Orion Offers Enterprise Version of Denali AI
Orion has moved its in-house AI integration platform from beta to enterprise level, executives said during the Omaha, Neb.-based wealthtech firm’s annual Ascent conference in San Diego.
Denali AI, which Orion said was in beta with select clients in October, is now available to advisory firms as a simple screen prompt that can pull data from across systems, including portfolio management, financial planning and customer relationship management.
Reed Colley, president of Orion Advisor Technology, said the speed at which the firm has been able to move with Denali AI, including security measures, has been “striking,” partly due to Orion’s own internal use of AI.
“We couldn’t have predicted that we’re now at a point where we’re able to build in skills tailored to advisors and to firms exactly for what they need in real time, and make it consistent,” he said on the sidelines of the conference. “We have an automated data pipeline that brings together data from our systems from outside, CRMs, planning systems, their data lakes, into our data lake, probably five to 10 times faster than we had before.”
Orion is making Denali AI available as mobile and tablet applications for a flat monthly subscription fee, with the price adjusted over time as the firm incorporates “real usage patterns.” The firm declined to provide the exact cost, saying plans could be adjusted based on usage time or per-user.
Orion will make the tool available to advisors of “all types and sizes” later this year.
Colley said Orion saw from the beta groups that the tool is helping save time by surfacing all client data and project points that are otherwise “hidden in systems.”
“The more we’re working with our clients, we’re finding use cases literally every day for how to go create this transformation,” he said.
Denali AI is also a move toward incorporating agentic AI and the use of prompt engineering, which Colley said creates automated prompts that can be saved and made “repeatable and shareable inside the organization.”
At Orion’s conference, the firm showcased Denali AI to advisors and had them feed in prompts to see how it works.
Demo sessions at the conference also included existing offerings such as Orion’s Summit Experience, now with Denali AI embedded, and its Redtail CRM tool, which it acquired in 2022.
In recent years, Orion has been building up its wealthtech ecosystem partly through acquisitions to capture the growth of the RIA sector. The strategy has grown to $5.8 trillion in assets under management and $133 billion in wealth management platform assets, and has also created various platforms, including Orion Advisor Tech, Orion Portfolio Solutions, Brinker (investment solutions), Redtail and Orion OCIO.
Its AI focus is helping those various parts to speak more seamlessly to each other. But other firms are also getting into the AI wealthtech race, ranging from competitor Envestnet to technology companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI. Orion is working directly with Anthropic on “back-end” work, Colley said, while keeping Denali AI agnostic to its partnerships.
He added that Orion is working to incorporate an advisory firm’s own AI systems into Denali AI so as not to turn off those with their own pre-built systems.
“Part of our integration plan and opportunity with our clients is to mesh with their AI so they can plug their AI into ours and be able to use them holistically,” he said. “That’s what we’re building into.”
Orion also announced two new AI assistants at the conference.
Its Report Assistant creates client-ready report drafts using firm templates. Separately, its Query Studio is designed for operations teams to pull data using plain-English queries, reducing time spent on administrative tasks.
The firm also announced plans to release an Orion Service Bot for advisor support and assistants for proposal generation, account opening, billing and client account reconciliation.
Over time, Colley sees many of the AI agents and services coming together into a more unified offering.
“We have built separate agents for now, but even now, our strategy is that they will be converging,” he said. “I think I’m half highlighting what we’re moving toward, and half predicting what I think the space is going to do.”