The Advisors Who Win Won't Be the Fastest

Twenty years of building companies taught me something that still feels backwards: the one who races to do everything usually loses.

The clearest proof is playing out right now, between OpenAI and Anthropic.

OpenAI got there first. The biggest name in AI, the brand everyone knew. And they ran like it — sprinting on every front at once. A video app. Consumer products. A browser. People and compute spread across a dozen races at the same time.

Anthropic did the opposite. They stepped back, picked one lane — tools for developers and enterprises — and just executed. Quarter after quarter, the same focused work.

For a while it looked like the slow choice.

Then this year the numbers turned. Anthropic overtook OpenAI in enterprise revenue, its coding tools took the majority of that market, and OpenAI quietly shut down its flagship video app — with leadership admitting it out loud: "fragmentation has been slowing us down."

One company sprinted. The other ran the marathon. The marathon is winning.

I think about this constantly right now, because 2026 is being called the year financial advisors finally adopt AI. The race is on. Everyone is sprinting to bolt something on before the next conference.

Here's what I'd tell an advisor in the middle of that noise.

The sprint is to look like you have AI. The marathon is to use it to become more human — to give back the hours you lose to admin and spend them where no machine can follow you: sitting across from a family at the worst moment of their financial life and being fully present.

And it's to grow into work you could never have built fast enough on your own.

The same AI that frees your time can finally unlock the data trapped inside the firm down the hall. Buy the bookkeeping practice and you don't just inherit its clients — you inherit a live view of their whole financial life, running on the infrastructure you already have. One client, one relationship, something neither firm could offer alone.

AI will eliminate the robot version of you. It won't touch the human one.

The advisors who win the next decade won't be the ones who adopted the fastest.

They'll be the ones who were still standing, and still trusted, when the sprinting stopped.

What are you sprinting toward right now that the marathon would tell you to ignore?