I have spent 30+ years in technology. I have seen multiple waves of disruption: the internet, mobile, cloud, SaaS. Each time, the same thing happens. The incumbents dismiss it. The early adopters get mocked. And then, almost overnight, everything changes.
AI is doing it again. And this time, I am watching it happen in two industries at once.
What I Saw on the Tech Side
Two and a half years ago, when GitHub Copilot (the coding assistant) started getting traction, the reaction from most software developers was predictable. “It hallucinates.” “It can’t handle complex logic.” “It’s a toy.” I heard this from senior engineers, CTOs, architects. Smart people who genuinely believed AI was not ready for serious development work.
Today, those same people are using Claude or Cursor for the majority of their coding. The conversation has flipped completely. We are now talking about whether junior developer roles will exist in five years.
That arc, from dismissal to disruption, took less than 30 months.
Aditya Agarwal posted this on X last month and it got 3.3 million impressions.
If you don’t know Aditya Agarwal, he describes himself as:
“I was one of the first engineers at Facebook, where I built the original search engine. I went on to become chief technology officer of Dropbox, where I scaled the engineering team from 25 people to a thousand.”
The best quote from that Tweet was:
“I spent a lot of time over the weekend writing code with Claude. And it was very clear that we will never ever write code by hand again. It doesn’t make any sense to do so. Something I was very good at is now free and abundant. I am happy…but disoriented.”
When someone like Aditya says that, you listen.
Now Watch What’s Happening in Wealth Management
I spend a lot of my time talking to the owners and principals of family offices and wealth advisory firms across India. These are sophisticated people, they manage billions of dollars. They have seen markets, cycles, and plenty of tech promises come and go.
When I bring up AI, the response is almost identical to what I heard from developers in 2022.
“It’s not accurate enough.” “It can’t understand the nuances of Indian taxation.” “Our clients want a human, not a chatbot.” “It made an error when I tested it on a complex portfolio query.”
I get it. These are fair concerns. And they are also, I believe, exactly the wrong conclusion to draw.
What the Next 18 to 24 Months Look Like
I am not predicting that relationship managers disappear. What I am predicting is that the nature of the job transforms completely, just like software development has.
The family office that used to need three analysts to consolidate a multi-asset portfolio report will need one, with AI doing the heavy lifting. The RM who used to spend two days preparing for a client review will do it in two hours.
The firms that start building these workflows now will be way ahead. The ones waiting for AI to be “ready” will find themselves in the same position as the companies that waited for mobile or cloud to mature. Playing catch-up in a market that has already moved on.
A Final Thought
I was essentially born and brought up in the US and moved to India in October 2005. I have spent the last two decades watching India’s wealth management industry grow from a cottage business into a genuinely sophisticated ecosystem. Some of the family offices I work with today are world-class in their thinking. They deserve world-class tools.
AI is not the threat to this industry. The real threat is assuming you have more time than you do.
The software developers thought that too.
UPDATE: Last week, Aditya shared a longer article on X about AI and coding, which you can find here:
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