In recent years, the buzzword in the family office world has been artificial intelligence. There is no shortage of conferences, webinars, and workshops to attend. And family offices are all asking the same questions: Where do we start? What is the best platform to use? And how do we keep our data safe? All good questions, but according to Ken of Aleta, buying the best doesn’t necessarily mean guaranteed results.
Having spoken personally with over 100 family offices this year alone, Ken has reached a clear conclusion: the tech is ready, but for most family offices, their foundation often isn’t up to the task. In this interview, he explains why family offices that roll up their sleeves to do the groundwork today are the only ones that will reap the rewards of AI tomorrow.
“The offices making real progress aren’t the ones with the biggest budgets or the flashiest tools. They are the ones that did the boring work first: cleaning their data, structuring it, making it accessible across systems rather than locked inside each platform."
The real bottleneck to AI adoption
Recent research shows that over two-thirds (63%) of family offices want to integrate AI into their wealth reporting. However, only 29% have actually managed to do so successfully. The biggest reasons why AI adoption in family offices is stalling are certainly not due to a lack of funds or technology.
In fact, in Ken’s observations, family offices get stuck because most of them sit in one of two camps. The first camp has its financial information sitting in different places, so in essence, they are working with fragmented data. The second camp, on the other hand, in an attempt to centralise all its financial operations, has locked itself up with a single service provider.
Both camps face challenges when enhancing their work with AI. For camp one, where data is fragmented or incomplete, AI is prone to hallucinations. Meanwhile, camp two, which has centralised its data with a single service provider, finds its AI evolution determined by the same provider rather than the family office itself.
Leadership decision, not an IT project
According to Ken, successful AI implementation in family offices is a leadership decision, not an IT project — and the biggest misconception is thinking otherwise. In other words, unfamiliar with how the technology actually works, some families treat AI as just another tool in the stack. They don’t realise that AI only works if the data underneath is trustworthy.
In order to have clean data, it takes a strategic leadership decision to stop building their software infrastructure on quicksand and start building for the long haul. He advises that top-tier family office infrastructure should resemble the following:
- At the bottom: The family office stack should have reconciled, machine-readable data across every custodian and asset class.
- In the middle: The stack should have an open protocol layer (API and MCP) that lets any AI model access all data securely.
- At the top: The agents themselves, handling liquidity briefings, what-if scenarios, PE document processing, and IC memos.
Fixing the foundation
For Ken, the pattern across those 100-plus conversations kept pointing to the same conclusion: family offices don't need more AI tools, they need a foundation those tools can actually trust. That's why Aleta was built to be that foundation.
Through its open architecture, Aleta provides an AI-native wealth platform that constitutes the bottom two layers of the model above: reconciled, machine-readable data across every custodian and asset class, and an open protocol layer (API and MCP) that lets any AI model a family office chooses query that data securely. Rather than locking families into a single provider's roadmap, it leaves the agents free to sit on top, without hallucinating or waiting on a vendor's permission.
The message to family offices is simple but uncomfortable: the flashy layer, the agents and dashboards, will only ever be as good as the data underneath. Investing in that unglamorous groundwork now is what separates the offices already seeing results from the ones still stuck in pilot mode.
"Without structured data, AI is hallucinating. With Aleta, it is precise." - Principal at Dreamers Collective, a multi-family office using Aleta.