The family office is already using AI.

The 2025 RBC and Campden Wealth report on North American family offices found three times as many offices using AI in their operations as the year before. Deloitte’s family-office research tells the same story from another angle: well over 40% are actively advancing their technology strategies. Whatever the posture of the principals, the office itself has started.

What has not kept up is structure. A family office is a small team handling capital statements, K-1s, trust accounting, and correspondence that exists precisely because it must not circulate. When AI arrives informally — a browser tab here, a personal subscription there — the office acquires exactly the kind of unexamined channel it was built to prevent. The adoption is not the risk. The informality is.

The offices that handle this well treat it as a staffing question rather than a software question. Few can justify a technology hire for it, and fewer want one. What they want is the thing the office already knows how to buy: an outside specialist with a defined mandate — decide what is sanctioned, set the terms, build what is worth building, and remain accountable for it.

The gain, for offices that get it right, is the one the lean office has always pursued: more capacity without more headcount, on terms the family would recognize as their own.