Orion Ascent 2026 is in the books, and I’m already sitting back in my office, still buzzing from the incredible energy and amazing experiences from last week. While it’s not quite the same as hosting on the main stage at Ascent, I still brought home a ton of great memories from the week.
And no, I’m not talking about the snacks, although they were all pretty delicious, or the Pop2000 afterparty concert, though I certainly admire all the throwback pooka shells and bucket hats I saw.
No, I’m not talking about the amazing keynote presentations from Orion’s leadership like Natalie Wolfsen, Reed Colley, Arun Anur, and Ron Pruitt. Nor am I referring to the amazing guests we had, like high-roller experience specialist Molly Bloom, or legendary coach to the greats Tim Grover.
When I say I brought home memories, I’m mostly thinking of the bigger story that kept showing up everywhere I turned throughout Ascent.
This year’s theme at Ascent was RELENTLESS, and I think we showed that we are truly dedicated to relentlessly innovating the future of financial advice on your behalf. Maybe most importantly, though, we’re doing it in a way that keeps the human connection at the center of everything we all do.
The world is moving fast. Clients expect answers faster. Teams are juggling more systems than ever. Honestly, it can be exhausting just thinking about it. But if we do our job right, the tech becomes the invisible part. The relationship becomes the main event.
So, I figured I’d do what any good internet article does and make a list. Here are some of the biggest announcements that came out of Ascent, along with a little commentary from yours truly on why it’s impactful and how it can help your practice.
AI partnerships that aim at the busywork, not the human work
Read the Announcement
One of the things I get most excited about with AI is not the flashy “look what it can do” stuff. It’s the quieter stuff. The “why did this take me 45 minutes last time but not anymore?” stuff.
That’s why the continued collaboration with Anthropic is particularly exciting to me. If we can work alongside leaders in AI innovation who are thinking seriously about the needs of financial services, that opens the door to tools that can help tackle the tedious tasks that eat up an advisor’s day.
Ultimately, the goal is not “replace the advisor.” The goal is “give the advisor their time back.”
If the tech can take on more of the sorting, summarizing, searching, and stitching things together, especially with a financial-services-focused design like Anthropic’s, that means advisors can spend more time doing the thing an app can’t ever really do: understanding a human being, connecting with them, and translating their expertise into client confidence.
Denali AI: the gravitational center of a firm’s data universe
Read the Announcement
AI can do SO many things. Workflow management, notetaking and summarization, I could go on. Denali AI is the kind of thing that would have sounded like an impossibility a decade ago, and now it feels like the direction the whole industry is heading.
Here’s how I keep thinking about it: firms have data scattered across a universe of systems. CRM. Planning. Portfolio tools. Documents. Internal notes. Workflows. That spreadsheet that someone refuses to let die. Each is a star, its own shining planet of information that’s valuable to the entirety of your practice.
Traditionally, getting all of that information in one place for easily-actionable next step suggestions or data analysis can be a pain of tangled integrations and data flowing in random directions. If you have ever felt like your best insights are trapped behind ten tabs and three logins, you know what I mean.
The guiding design principal is that Denali is more than just a tool, it’s an entire data strategy, a place where a firm can centralize the data sources they trust, choose which points they want to use, and then actually do something with it. Faster research. clearer answers. better next steps. Less wandering the cosmos looking for the right pieces in the right places.
And if we get that right, it has a ripple effect. AI innovation that improves the broader ecosystem can also help push us toward a more robust, more user-friendly advisor experience over time, which leads to the same enhancements to the client experience. Not because “AI is cool,” but because it can reduce friction across everything advisors and their teams touch.
Insurance and annuity solutions, built into the flagship workflow
Read the Announcement
Advisors have been asking for deeper insurance and annuity integration into their existing fintech for years, especially as they’ve taken on advising with more and more of their clients lives.
That’s why I think Orion’s recent DPL Financial Partners announcement matters. Bringing insurance solutions into Orion Connect can help make it more accessible and more integrated into the advisor workflow.
To me, that’s the theme again. Reduce the swivel chair. Reduce the system hopping. Make it easier for teams to operate like one coordinated unit, because that’s what clients feel on the other side. That smoothness translates into the experience.
Remember, clients don’t experience your tech stack. They don’t typically ask about what CRM you’re using. They experience your responsiveness, your understanding, and your ability to connect the dots.
Making the big picture bigger and more personal at the same time
Read the Announcement
Another announcement that really stood out to me at Ascent was Orion’s continued progress toward Unified Managed Household (UMH), which is all about helping advisors manage a client’s full financial picture at the household level instead of one account at a time.
Now, I’m not usually an accounts-first kind of guy, but if you’ve been in this industry for a while, you’re likely already all too familiar with the challenge. Clients typically don’t think about their finances as a collection of disconnected accounts. They think about their life. Their family. Their goals. Their future. But historically, the technology advisors have had to work with hasn’t always made it easy to manage everything in one coordinated view.
That’s exactly what our UMH strategy is aiming to solve.
With the upcoming enhancements in 2026, advisors will be able to manage taxable and non-taxable accounts together, apply tax-aware strategies across an entire household, and optimize things like asset location, cash flow, and risk across multiple accounts and registrations. Instead of looking at pieces of the puzzle separately, the technology starts helping advisors see the full picture.
This is yet another upgrade coming to you that was born directly from your feedback. In our 2026 Advisor Wealthtech Survey, 84% of advisors say managing a client household through a single coordinated portfolio would be valuable, and a large portion of firms expect to expand their use of household-level management and tax optimization over the next few years.
What really gets me pumped is how this ties back to the bigger theme we kept hearing throughout Ascent: personalization at scale.
When advisors have the ability to coordinate decisions across an entire household, they can spend less time wrestling with account-level mechanics and more time focusing on strategy and people. Where should assets live? How can we minimize tax drag? How does this portfolio decision affect the broader family plan?
In other words, it becomes less about managing accounts and more about managing relationships and outcomes.
Reed Colley said the quiet part out loud: most time is spent not advising
Listen to the Podcast
Candidly, Reed is one of my favorite people to listen to lately, especially as he continues to take the approach of keeping humans involved as the key part of the process.
While appearing on Kelly Waltrich’s ‘Don’t Do That’ podcast, he called out something we all know deep down: depending on role and status, advisors can spend 60 to 75 percent of their time not advising. Those previously mentioned WealthTech survey results support this. 67% of you told us you want your tech to reduce manual work, with 44% and 30% also mentioning you want your tech to help you give more time to focus on clients and deliver personalized advice, respectfully.
I’m guessing that some of you reading feel those numbers in your bones, because it is not a some made-up fairy-tale problem. It’s the daily reality of running a practice nowadays. Admin work. Data chasing. Meeting prep. Switching between systems. Creating the same summary for the fifth time this week. It’s okay, you can get up and take a hot lap around the office if you need.
As someone who’s entire career has been about building relationships, I’m a huge fan of the way Reed continuously frames the purpose of AI. Not to automate the most human pieces, but to automate the monotonous pieces that keep advisors from going deeper with clients.
So it should come as no surprise that I agree with Reed on what we’re trying to accomplish: focusing on what humans do best, and let technology handle the rest.
That is the north star. Faster speed of advice. Expanded capacity. Deeper relationships. I highly recommend listening to their conversation!
The Redtail tease I might get in trouble for… an AI First CRM
Don’t freak out, but we have big plans for Redtail’s future just as much as everything else.
In our AI learning labs and AI chat rooms, we offered an early sneak peek into numerous AI-centric approaches and topics, including AI Governance in your office, AI and BeFi working together, and most excitingly to me: the future plans for Redtail CRM.
We want to bring you a CRM this year that is faster, smarter, and simpler in every way. One that closes the gaps between advisor and technology to become a client intelligence hub for you and your team.
From allowing you to get searches and reports through asking clear questions rather than clicking around an interface, to powerfully automated workflows that can be trigged with a single prompt, our plans are all about shifting how you experience your CRM in your day-to-day. Imagine asking Redtail to add a new account, and it does the five steps your firm typically requires right then and there.
Think of a proactive CRM nudging you towards your next best actions all based on your data. I’m talking about being told who’re the best candidates for outreach, whose anniversaries are coming up. Milestone alerts. Client touch recommendations. A place where your system helps you act at the right time, not just store information.
If Denali is about organizing and activating a firm’s data universe, this Redtail direction feels like it could become the everyday command center for relationship intelligence. The place where the human story of the client is actually usable in real time.
And yes, I know, “AI First CRM” as a statement can be intimidating, eyebrow-raising, even. Make no mistake, it’s bold. It’s a real swing at a real problem: digging out advisors and their teams from under the time-eating tasks so they can be fully present with the people who’ve given them their trust.
Relentless tech that makes smoother experiences and deeper relationships
Amongst all the breakouts, keynotes, announcements, and networking, one thing was very clear to me at Ascent:
We are building tools that can help advisors spend less time being system operators and more time being trusted humans with deep advisor-client relationships.
That is the future I want, that’s the use of AI I can get behind. Tech that fades into the background when it should. Tech that speeds up the boring stuff. Tech that helps you show up for clients with clarity, confidence, and more time to actually listen.
Ascent has me very excited for what the future holds in this industry. If we’ve done our job right, you won’t be talking about the tech at all. You’ll just be talking about how good it feels to actually have time again.
To those who didn’t make it this year, you were certainly missed, and to those that did, I couldn’t be happier that you were a part of it. I hope that everyone, attendee or not, is able to take away great insights and details as to how Orion and Redtail are continuing to work with you on shaping the future of financial advice.
I can’t wait to see where we’re at next year!