Family offices are adopting AI, but their reporting is still done by hand

Summary: RBC and Campden Wealth's latest North American study shows a striking gap. Offices are quick to try new tools, yet the basic job of producing one reliable picture of the family's wealth remains slow and manual.

At the end of September 2026, RBC and Campden Wealth released The North America Family Office Report 2026, the North American part of Campden's 13th annual global family office study. It draws on 155 single family offices and private multi-family offices: 123 in the United States, 21 in Canada and 11 elsewhere in the Americas. The families behind them have an average net worth, including operating businesses, of US$2.25 billion. With only 21 Canadian respondents, the report does not break out Canadian results, but the issues it describes will be familiar to Canadian investment counsel firms and multi-family offices.

Most of the coverage focused on investment sentiment and artificial intelligence. The finding that matters most for anyone who runs or serves a family office is less dramatic. Seventy-three per cent of offices say investment reporting is still too manual, and the report notes that this has been a top concern for three years running.

A familiar problem that has not moved

In her foreword, Manju Jessa of RBC's Enterprise Strategic Client Group puts it plainly: "many core processes – particularly investment reporting – remain highly manual." The data back her up.

The report's numbers on technology point in two directions at once. On one side, adoption of new tools is fast. About half of offices use generative or agentic AI to research text, news and transcripts, and roughly a third use it as an aid in investment reporting or to build internal knowledge bases. Half say AI is now embedded and essential to their workflow.

On the other side, the basics are still unresolved. Among near-term operational risks, "too many manual processes" was cited by 44 per cent of offices, and "over-reliance on spreadsheets" by 32 per cent. Looking further out, the top long-term risk is failure to upgrade technology, at 51 per cent, ahead of family members being unprepared for succession.

The report offers one explanation: the median IT spend among respondents is US$100,000, which the authors describe as under-investment relative to the problem.

Why reporting is the hard part

It is tempting to treat this as a software purchasing question. In practice, the difficulty of family office reporting comes from the shape of the wealth, not the shortage of tools.

A typical family in this survey does not hold its wealth in a few accounts. It holds it through holding companies, trusts, partnerships and operating businesses, often across several custodians and jurisdictions. The RBC report finds that 86 per cent of offices invest in private markets, and that direct investments make up, on average, 45 per cent of the private markets book. Those holdings do not arrive in a daily custodian feed. They come as capital account statements, valuations and spreadsheets, on different schedules.

To produce a single view of what the family owns, someone has to:

• gather positions and values from every custodian, manager and private investment;
• attribute each holding to the right entity, and each entity to the right family members through its ownership percentages;
• reconcile the timing differences between a daily public-markets value and a quarterly private valuation;
• add the assets no custodian reports at all, such as real estate held directly or a stake in the family business.

Each of those steps is a judgement call before it is a calculation. When the structure lives in someone's head or in a spreadsheet, the report can only be as current as the last time that person updated it.

AI does not fix missing structure

This is where the two halves of the RBC findings meet. AI tools can summarize a statement, extract figures from a PDF and draft commentary. They cannot decide, on their own, that a holding company is 60 per cent owned by one trust and 40 per cent by a parent, or that a property titled to one sibling is economically shared with another. If that structure is not recorded somewhere reliable, an AI assistant produces faster versions of the same incomplete picture.

The report's own framing points to the same conclusion. Jessa writes that the challenge will increasingly be one of implementation, meaning the integration of tools, data and workflows. Put differently, the order matters. Model the family and its entities first, connect the data to that model, and then apply automation to the steps that are genuinely repetitive.

Security is now part of the same conversation

The 2026 report also records a sharp change in what keeps offices up at night. Cybersecurity and data breaches are now the top near-term operational concern, cited by 59 per cent of offices, up from 16 per cent the year before. Fifty-nine per cent experienced phishing attempts in the past year, and a quarter saw a family member's personal accounts breached. At the same time, reported use of two-factor authentication fell from 92 to 83 per cent, and dual payment authorization from 84 to 73 per cent. The authors note that the sample changed from last year, so some year-on-year movement may reflect who responded.

This is relevant to reporting because manual reporting is not only slow; it also tends to spread sensitive data across email attachments, shared drives and personal spreadsheets. Every copy of a consolidated family balance sheet is a copy that has to be protected. Reducing manual steps is a security measure as much as an efficiency one.

What offices and their advisors can do now

None of this requires a large transformation programme. A few practical steps tend to make the biggest difference:

1. Write down the structure. List every entity, who owns it and in what proportion, and who controls it. This is the foundation every consolidated report depends on.
2. Separate the feeds from the judgement. Automate the custodian data that arrives reliably. Keep a clear, dated record of the manual inputs, such as private valuations and directly held property, so everyone knows what each figure is and when it was last updated.
3. Decide on one version of the truth. If the office, the investment counsel firm and the accountant each maintain their own spreadsheet, the family has three answers to the same question. Agree on where the consolidated picture lives.
4. Bring the dates in. Fiscal year-ends, loan terms, trust anniversaries and document expiries are part of the same picture. They belong next to the balance sheet, not in a separate calendar.
5. Test AI on the repetitive steps first. Extraction from statements and first drafts of commentary are reasonable starting points, with a person reviewing the result.

Closing thoughts

The headline from this year's RBC and Campden Wealth report is not that family offices lack ambition with technology. It is that the most basic deliverable, an accurate and current picture of what the family owns, is still assembled by hand in most offices. Tools will keep improving. The offices that benefit first will be the ones whose structure is already recorded clearly enough for those tools to work with. That entity-first foundation, with look-through ownership and consolidated net worth built on top of it, is what Mozaiik is designed to provide.

Sources

• RBC Wealth Management and Campden Wealth, The North America Family Office Report 2026 (released late September 2026): https://www.rbcwealthmanagement.com/assets/wp-content/uploads/documents/campaign/the-north-america-family-office-report-2026.pdf
• RBC Wealth Management, "2026 RBC and Campden Wealth report: North American family offices shift from caution to optimism amid great wealth transfer, AI acceleration" (news release dated September 29, 2026; web page dated October 1, 2026): https://www.rbcwealthmanagement.com/en-us/newsroom/2026-10-01/2026-rbc-and-campden-wealth-report-north-american-family-offices-shift-from-caution-to-optimism-amid-great-wealth-transfer-ai-acceleration
• RBC Wealth Management, family office report landing page: https://www.rbcwealthmanagement.com/family-office-report