Inside Our Pilot: How Five Advisors Cut Documentation Time From 52 to 8 Minutes

The most-discussed slide we have shown across investor and advisor conversations is a simple bar chart: a 52-minute orange bar labeled "before," an 8-minute olive bar labeled "after," and a footnote noting that both numbers were measured the same way. The chart is exact and the numbers are real, but on its own it is the least-interesting version of the story. The interesting version is what happens in the four weeks between those two bars, what each of the five advisors who participated reported about the experience, and what the documentation looks like on either side. This piece is that fuller version.

Picture the desks of the five advisors during the pilot: each had a laptop with the meeting recording running, a CRM activity record open, a calendar showing back-to-back review meetings, and a printed time-tracking sheet on the right of the keyboard. The sheet had three columns - meeting metadata, documentation start time, documentation end time - and it was hand-filled after each documentation session for the eight weeks of the study (four weeks pre-pilot baseline, four weeks post-ramp).

Pilot setup

Five lead advisors across three independent RIA practices participated. All five worked primarily with retail households (median household AUM in the low seven figures), all five were the lead advisor on their meetings (no paraplanner-led meetings counted), and all five had been at their current practice for at least three years. The pilot ran across an eight-week window with a two-week onboarding gap between baseline and pilot phases. Documentation time was measured per meeting from the moment the advisor opened the meeting record to draft the note to the moment the record was committed and the follow-up email sent.

The 52-minute baseline

Across 196 meetings during the four-week baseline, mean documentation time was 52 minutes per meeting. The distribution was right-skewed - median 48 minutes, 75th percentile 61 minutes, top decile 88 minutes. Time inside that 52-minute average broke down roughly: 22 minutes composing the meeting note, 9 minutes on CRM updates, 10 minutes drafting the follow-up email, 7 minutes (weighted average) on suitability/IPS revisions, and 4 minutes on final review.

The 8-minute steady state

Across 188 meetings during the four-week post-ramp phase, mean documentation time was 8 minutes per meeting (median 7 minutes, 75th percentile 11 minutes, top decile 19 minutes). The composition shifted entirely: roughly 5 minutes reviewing and editing the AI-drafted note, 1 minute completing the suitability rationale field, 1 minute confirming CRM writebacks, 1 minute polishing the follow-up email. The follow-up email was generated as a draft from the meeting note rather than composed separately.

The shape of the savings. The single biggest source of compression was not the meeting note itself; it was eliminating the cold-start problem of composing prose from scribbled keywords. Editing a structured draft is a different cognitive task than composing one, and it is faster across every advisor in the pilot.

The two-week ramp

The two weeks between baseline and pilot phases were spent on three activities: a one-hour onboarding session per advisor, configuration of the meeting-note template to match each practice's CRM activity layout, and a side-by-side period during which advisors generated AI drafts but continued to compose their own notes for comparison. The side-by-side period averaged 9 meetings per advisor and surfaced the small per-practice configuration choices (how to handle multi-attendee meetings, where to put plan-section revisions, how aggressively to prompt for suitability rationale) that needed to be settled before the pilot phase began.

What the records look like

The documentation produced post-pilot is structurally different in three ways:

• Per-claim citation. Every recommendation, alternative, and conflict named in the note has a citation pointing back to the moment in the transcript it came from.
• Field completeness. Suitability rationale, alternatives considered, and conflicts disclosed are present in 96% of post-pilot meetings versus 47% of baseline meetings (the largest delta in the dataset).
• Plain-prose rationale. The suitability rationale field is human-authored and reads more consistently than baseline notes, in part because the advisor is editing fresh after the meeting rather than reconstructing forty-five minutes of conversation from memory.

What surprised the advisors

Three findings that advisors flagged unprompted in post-pilot interviews:

• The flagging of contradictions between meeting transcripts and on-file profiles surfaced profile-refresh cues in roughly one in seven meetings - cues advisors mostly would not have written into their own notes.
• The post-meeting energy cost dropped before the time cost did. Several advisors reported feeling less drained at the end of a documentation-heavy afternoon by week two, even though the time savings did not stabilize until week three.
• The follow-up emails became more consistent. Clients are not the audience for this study, but two practices noted client comments on the increased detail in summary emails post-pilot.

Where the savings did not appear

Two areas where the pilot did not show meaningful improvement: complex planning sessions (estate-restructuring meetings, business-sale planning meetings) where the documentation tail is dominated by plan-document revision rather than note-taking; and meetings with poor audio (advisors using car phone audio for drive-time check-ins). The product is shaped around contemporaneous transcripts; meetings without good transcript material do not benefit much from the assistant. Both categories accounted for fewer than 10% of meetings in the pilot.

The honest framing

Pilot results across five advisors are not industry-wide validation. They are evidence that a bounded set of advisors in our early cohort experienced a documentation-time reduction from 52 to 8 minutes per meeting, with structurally improved record quality alongside the time savings. We are running the pilot pattern across a larger advisor cohort through 2026; the early read is consistent enough that the design choices in the product (per-claim citation, structured extraction, human-authored suitability rationale) are the ones we will continue to ship.

Source notes

• SEC Advisers Act Rule 204-2 recordkeeping requirements as the documentation baseline.
• FINRA Notice 4530 supervisory record expectations.
• Cerulli U.S. Advisor Metrics 2025 on advisor time allocation.
• T3/Inside Information 2025 Advisor Software Survey on documentation tooling adoption.
• IAA 2026 Investment Adviser Industry Snapshot on staffing and capacity in independent RIAs.