By Steve Garmhausen

On Monday, Ameriprise Financial's Bill Williams will expand his role from managing the company's independent channel to leading its entire, 10,000 plus-strong financial advisor force -- and he's clear about his objective. "Our job is to do everything we can to enhance [advisors'] productivity," says the 37-year veteran of the Minneapolis-based company. "It's where we're staking our claim in the market."

Williams, who on Monday will add Ameriprise's employee-advisor group, its bank and credit union program, and its advisor recruiting operation to his remit, has been one of the key players in helping the business remake itself from a traditional brokerage firm into an advice-driven, multichannel wealth platform. Speaking with Barron's Advisor, Williams reveals how the company's embrace of technology and artificial intelligence is helping advisors and moving the productivity needle. He explains why channel mobility is so important for advisors. And he argues that service-quality slippage at rival firms is becoming a recruiting advantage.

You will soon lead Ameriprise's entire advisor force. How will you measure success in the next few years? At Ameriprise we have a clear view of what drives success, and the formula is pretty straightforward. We focus first on advisors' organic growth, on building client trust, and the client experience. We have proven tactics for client acquisition in partnership with our advisors. And we help advisors be really efficient with how they operate their business so that they can focus on client experience and driving growth through client acquisition.

Our job is to do everything we can to enhance that productivity. It's where we're staking our claim in the market. Long term, our [advisors' assets under management] are up an average of 12% compounded annually, meaning about every six years they're doubling their book. So that is what success looks like across all the channels. The channels have been run well, and I'm excited and privileged to lead all of them. Having the channels under a single head, even though they have been run well, will give us an opportunity to streamline how we support them.

Any metrics aside from assets under management that you're underlining? We care about what the advisor cares about, which is growing their top-line revenue and making sure they're bringing on quality new clients. Those are a couple of other metrics we pay a lot of attention to.

Can you say a word about your recruiting goals? We're very selective about who we bring in, so we're focused on finding high-quality advisors who are focused on advice, who want to be part of our culture, want to deliver a great client experience, and want to focus on growing their business over time in a thoughtful way that leverages technology. We're not focused on having the most advisors. We certainly want to increase recruiting year over year. But the most important thing is that our existing advisors get a great experience, and then it's recruiting the right ones.

How can you improve alignment between the businesses? The first thing we focus on is making sure advisors know they have choice. They can be an independent advisor. They could work in one of our bank branches. Maybe they want to be an employee in one of our corporate headquarters across the country, and they want to deliver advice more remotely to clients. If they want to be licensed and give great advice, there are affiliation options. We've got 10,500 advisors and growing, and this gives the advisor, depending on where they are in their career, flexibility. At some point, they might want to be an employee, at another, an independent. They may want to have options for how they transition their clients and realize their equity in the future, and we want to provide them with choice. But no matter which platform they choose, they have the same great technology, the same full suite of products, the same brand that is enhancing their marketing, and the growth capabilities.

Are there things you're doing to make it easier to go from one channel to another? Yes, by having the same technology across our business. Literally, if an advisor said they wanted to move from one platform to another, after we work out slight differences in payout or cost structure, everything else is seamless. It's a click of a button inside Ameriprise to move from one platform to another. It really comes down to how they want to run their business, and do they want to be an employee or an independent contractor.

Biggest challenges? We've launched a number of new technology tools and practice-efficiency tools in the past couple of years, whether it's AI tools for helping advisor prepare for, conduct and summarize meetings, or investment tools like our Signature Wealth Program [the company's new unified managed account program]. We're seeing great uptake, and we've done a lot to train and make sure the advisors are aware of the workflows, to incorporate it into their practice. But there's still a lot of room to go there.

We're adding more capabilities all the time; we have releases coming in the next few quarters that will give more flexibility, more choice, and more options. We've built this foundation over the past 10 years, and we spend about a billion dollars a year on our technology and our digital platform. We're proud of it, but we're enhancing it all the time. How do you help an advisor feed data into financial planning software so it's seamless and doesn't require humans to touch it as much? How can we help them prepare for their next service meeting by scraping all the data we know about the client from our data lake.

I think we're at the cutting edge when you compare us against the industry for all of those pieces. But there's still an advisor-practice training element to it, helping them to realize the potential is training their staff, repurposing the staff to be more client-driven, helping the advisor realize they might be able to do, you know, 20 meetings in a week if they were doing 10. We're past building the infrastructure, and now it's about adoption.

And I guess one of the things you're up against is inertia and the truism that old habits die hard. That's right. Our average advisor has 24 years with Ameriprise, and they've done things a certain way that is been successful for them. But we're launching new technologies, and you have to break an old habit.

Ameriprise is sometimes described as a higher cost, more product-driven platform than some others. What's your perspective? I want to be clear right up front: Our advisors don't have product sales goals. There are no economic incentives to sell any particular product lines. It's really about what the right thing is for the client. We take our fiduciary responsibilities very seriously.

Where we are today as a firm today is highly evolved from where we might have been 20 years ago. We offer a very broad, integrated set of capabilities, including a full suite of banking capabilities, a full suite of alternatives, and a full suite of annuity and insurance carriers.

Building trust is our No. 1 priority. And hundreds of thousands of our clients completing a survey give us a 4.9 out of five. Our clients are getting deep, personalized advice across a broad suite of high-quality products that Ameriprise can stand behind. I would put our compliance processes up against anybody, and our fiduciary accountability and suitability standards are met across all of that. It has been an evolution for us over the past 20 years, and we've built something impressive.

As you seek to increase advisor head count at Ameriprise, what can you do to protect against poaching? Right now we're a top destination. We're getting top practices to join us already, and they're telling us once they get her, that they're exceptionally impressed with our technology, our culture of support, and that the onboarding is best in class. It's a high-touch, white-glove environment whether it's the leadership to help them grow, our technology training, or the onboarding support. I think they sense the difference when they come, and they're telling their friends. The No. 1 place I'm getting leads is from referrals from advisors who have come here and are growing.

What are some of the things advisors say they're dissatisfied with at other firms? I speak personally with some of the best recruits in our pipeline, and I ask, "Why are you checking us out?" The No. 1 response is service. When they call in and need answers and transactions for their clients, the wait time, the answers they're getting, the way they feel supported by the broker-dealer matters a lot. In some firms it has gone down. The second thing is technology. They need a firm that is investing and getting on the cutting edge, whether it's AI or logging in once and being able to seamlessly transact for the client and move across their CRM to their brokerage to their wealth management platform. It has to be seamless. It has to be easy for them to train their team. The other thing is culture. They want a high-quality, high-touch, high-value experience for their clients -- and they want to know they're being treated that way by their broker-dealer. In some cases the firms that have grown really fast are losing that edge, and we're a beneficiary of that.

Is AI having a quantifiable impact yet at Ameriprise, or is it too early? One hundred percent. We're seeing advisors who adopt the AI tools we've built adding significant growth. We did a study over the past five years and found that advisors spend about 70% of their time preparing for, conducting, and following up on client service meetings. The average practice has 300 or 400 clients, and they're meeting with each client multiple times a year. We use AI to help them to scrape all the past conversations with that client, put together a full, end-to-end agenda, examine all their current investments, solutions, and products -- all the to-do's from the last meeting, and it fully summarizes everything and pulls it into a simplified digital presentation to the client with appropriate links.

We've also enabled AI to listen in on that meeting and produce a compliance summary of actions and to-do's and automatically populate the CRM with delegation to staff members and follow-up alerts. We've saved our advisors about 30% to 40% of the time it was taking them to do these meetings. And they're turning it into more meetings per week and deeper conversations with clients. So they're picking up more net flows, more referrals, and a deeper relationship.

We're also launching another cool tool. When a client sends their data into a practice, it comes in various forms: paper, digital, a shoebox. Advisors can scan that and feed it into an AI model, which then pulls relevant data and feeds it into our financial planning software. So you don't need somebody sitting at a desk sorting through it and doing manual data entry. That's saving significant time, too, especially for new-client setup. Those advisors who leaned in early are seeing the best growth in the company.

You've said you're skeptical of "innovation theater." Explain. Innovation theater is when you say you've got all these tools, or you slap AI onto an offering but it isn't fully integrated end-to-end across the system. We've spent the bulk of our time and money as a company making sure that the advisor can operate seamlessly end-to-end. Whether it's bringing on a new client, gathering and analyzing data, or preparing for a service meeting, all of it has to be AI-enabled. And for AI to help you deliver better, deeper advice, you need all the data on a client pulled into a central place. We've spent 10 years building that data lake. So AI looks in one place under the client name and account number and pulls everything together quickly and accurately for the advisor to then give great advice.

Thanks, Bill.

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May 29, 2026 13:16 ET (17:16 GMT)

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