Entering the Era of Hyper-Personalization

Jason Chepenik has seen many investing innovations during his more than 30 years as a financial adviser, but for much of that time, the end-user experience for advisers and clients was in a time warp of analog quarterly statements, basic websites and lengthy forms.

“It would take hours to do a financial plan,” says Chepenik, a senior vice president of retirement and wealth at OneDigital. “The numbers are always stale the day you deliver it.”

With the recent rise of artificial intelligence in the advisory field, not only are advisers increasing tempo and output, but their work is increasingly customized to suit an individual client’s needs. In the past couple of years, advisers have started to realize the promise of scalable hyper-personalization and integrating all aspects of financial wellness.

“This isn’t as simple as Amazon knows my buying wishes or the things I like. … That’s still pushing somebody to buy something,” Chepenik says. “This personalization—something that knows me and my family and can do all the math—can help me figure out what my next best action step is.”

There is clear demand from sponsors and participants. In sister publication PLANSPONOR’s 2026 Defined Contribution Plan Benchmarking Report, 68% of surveyed plan sponsors said financial wellness programs were very useful to participants, and 57% agreed that such programs provide measurable return on investment. While 65.2% said their organization did not have an integrated financial wellness program, 46.5% said they were likely to implement or expand wellness programs in the next two or three years.

Becoming One of a Kind

Even before a client and adviser meet, customization is often put to work. An adviser can use marketing software to target specific demographics, and programs can glean insights from public social media accounts to see which advisers and participants are potentially more compatible.

Phil Kerkel, a partner in Capco’s wealth and asset management practice, gives an example: “This person practices yoga—if I pair them up with the adviser that practices yoga, they already have something connecting them that they’re going to be able to talk about … as well as just the financial level and the demographic level.”

Data are the key elements. Payroll data usually provide age, salary and retirement account information, but employers’ data can expand the picture with details about participants’ spouses, dependents, geographic location—all of which can influence finances.

“I’m interested in seeing the data on all of the 50-year-olds and if they are under-saved for retirement, because I want to have conversations with them,” says Dennis Elliott, T. Rowe Price’s head of product and platforms for retirement plan services.

Platforms are also encouraging participants to enter more data. T. Rowe Price’s Personalized Retirement Manager, a dynamic qualified default investment alternative managed account, not only incorporates 401(k) recordkeeping data, but asks for other relevant data such as retirement goals, spousal savings and other household assets. Those results, in turn, affect an individual’s glide path and investment allocations. Similarly, Capco has partnered with analytics software provider Envizage Ltd. to create a simulation-based advice engine for financial services.

On the adviser side, OneDigital has developed more than a dozen “AI coworkers”—specialized programs that answer procedural questions and boost productivity in various company verticals. T. Rowe Price developed its own proprietary internal generative AI tool, ChatTRP, to streamline adviser workflows.

Kerkel says advisers can rethink how they approach formulaic tasks like proposals so that they will resonate better with participants.

“The first thing an adviser says is, ‘Flip to Page 40,’ because that’s the culmination of the analysis,” Kerkel says. “That whole paradigm should shift away from doing these cookie-cutter proposals—that you only care about some of the information that’s being generated—to doing things that are very tailored specifically to your clients.”

Likewise, AI could take the burden off specialists and outside consultants, shifting time previously spent on specialized tasks like drawing up legal documents to strategizing and brainstorming.

“I do not want to eliminate professionals [through AI automation],” Chepenik says. “But the use of a professional can now be conversational, can be ideation.”

Changing Advisers’ Conversations

By adopting AI, Kerkel says advisers may shift the very nature of their messaging with clients.

“It can create a story for you—a narrative for your client—that’s very different from the way that you’re telling that story today,” he says. “Telling them, ‘We’ve already factored in these things because we know this about your lifestyle, your interests’—that’s hyper-personalized, but also speaks their language.”

Elliott says participants could be on the cusp of accessing holistic, “true financial wellness.” Much like the broader convergence of wealth and retirement, hyper-personalization tools can gather previously disparate aspects of a participant’s finances—401(k) accounts, emergency and health savings accounts, student loans and more.

“401(k) plans, for a lot of folks, are the biggest asset that they have, and so it’s a center of gravity,” Elliott says. “We can deliver a lot of value around the 401(k) plan at really low cost.”

Yet this moment of expanding possibility could also be a closing window. As the advisory industry grapples with ethical concerns over AI and the widespread automation of jobs, early adopters of AI may potentially elbow out and far outpace the competition.

“You’ve got to be first to market,” Chepenik says. “Every month is a new [AI] coworker [that] is just getting smarter by the millisecond to help me be better at my job.”

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