Rick Wurster attempts full rebuttal of Wall Street fear that AI is disrupting Schwab, but investors react, again, by dumping shares as they did on Hazel AI launch in February

Maybe Rick Wurster can relate to Bob Dylan's lament that he gave her his heart but she wanted his soul.

The Charles Schwab CEO delivered the quarterly financial results Wall Street expected but not the AI paradigm zeitgeist that it wanted – with punishing results for Schwab's stock (SCHW).

Shares nosedived to $92.62, down 7.63% but still near the high end of its 52-week range of $73.76 to $107.50 – beating earnings estimates and falling a tad shy on revenues.

It was a virtual repeat performance of the dramatic sell-off Schwab suffered after Altruist released Hazel AI on Feb. 10. See: Altruist CEO Jason Wenk says he was caught off guard in Mexico when his firm's 'DeepSeek' moment triggered a 'Big 3' Wall Street meltdown, but his AI revolution is only beginning, he tells RIABiz 

Shares closed at $107.21 on Feb. 9 then slid the next three trading sessions to $93.08 by the close on Feb. 17th.

It's not as counterintuitive as it might appear, according to Hitesh Dundi, product leader of AI and machine learning at Vanguard says by email.

“Concretely, a real reimagination looks like this: one unified client data layer that treats estate, tax, portfolio, and account data as a single source of truth — not thirteen integrations and a reconciliation spreadsheet.,” he says.

“Schwab, with its distribution and data, is the best-positioned incumbent to do it. But Wurster’s Q1 pitch — client-facing assistants in June, generative search, an AI research tool, more Wealth.com — is AI bolted onto existing products. That’s a feature roadmap, not a reimagination. Thursday’s 7.6% drop tells you the market saw it the same way; the slight revenue miss is the excuse, not the reason.”

Indeed, Wurster came with AI game for today's quarterly call with Wall Street analysts. He announced Schwab had “led” a $65 million investment into AI-based Wealth.com to coincide with earnings as evidence of the quick action Schwab is taking to embrace AI. 

Danny Lohrfink, co-founder and chief product officer, Wealth.com, explained to RIABiz how his firm can be pivotal for Schwab in making a grander play at wealth management with AI.

“We bought wealth.com, not estateplanning.com,” he says, by email. "Our ambitions have been clear from Day 1 to bring wealth management into the AI era. Strategically, we have opted to take on the most complex areas of the industry first with estate and tax planning, but we are not stopping here.

“Yes, absolutely, this something Schwab can leverage as it brings AI to its enterprise,” he said in answer to a question asking that. “In addition to Schwab, our AI estate and tax agents are being actively deployed to 3 of the top 5 largest banks in America. We will be unveiling three new, groundbreaking specialized agents by the end of the year.”

Developing AI fluency

Wurster – warning it would take a “few minutes” – launched into a full-blown presentation (1,100 uninterrupted words) about all the ways Schwab is rising to the AI challenge.

It wasn't all AI abstraction; he included hard data points to bolster his arguments.

“We have equipped every one of our 33,000 employees with AI tools and are seeing tremendous creativity as they are developing fluency in AI and embracing the ways it can transform how we work,” he said.

“We are accelerating the pace at which our Schwab engineers build technology. More than 8,000 of our technologists are using AI to design, code, test and fix bugs, all of which increases our speed. 

Difficult transition

But Altruist CEO Jason Wenk says he believes Wealth.com will face a steep climb trying to morph from a AI tool to a full-blown AI product.

“Wealth.com is still mostly an estate planning tool and has quite a way to go before becoming a full-fledged AI product,” he says by email.

“It's very challenging for software products built with many data entry fields and traditional user interfaces - featuring numerous navigation elements, buttons, and toggles - to transition to the more agentic UX of modern vertical AI applications. ”

Dundi agrees that Wealth.com has ‘quite a way to go’ and explains in more detail and feel the narrative was expanded to meet the moment.

“Wealth.com’s ‘all-things-AI for wealth managers’ framing, announced the same week Schwab led a $65M Series B, reads as narrative management more than strategy,” he says. 

"Rafael needed a story bigger than estate planning to justify the multiple; Schwab needed to show it owns an AI horse. Both got what they needed on April 16. What the press release doesn’t tell you is how far ‘all-things-AI’ is from shipping. Custodian feeds are fragmented, inconsistent, and riddled with exceptions that don’t surface until you’re three weeks into an implementation. 

"Ester Intelligence [brand of Wealth.com's engine] works in estate planning because the scope is narrow and the documents are semi-structured. Extending it across tax, portfolio, and service is multi-year data engineering before you even get to the model layer.

Investors may have been attuned to relatively surface-level ways that Schwab is initially applying AI, says Stephen Chen, CEO of Boldin, which is heavily using agentic AI to deliver financial planning directly to investors.

“It feels like they're starting with safer things first,” he says. “They're building tools more for the advisor than for the end investor.”

Wurster echoed that by saying, “Every one of our sales, service and advice professionals is using AI every day to elevate every interaction they have with clients.”

Deeper relationships

The general Wurster message is that Schwab can do more with less using AI.

“First, AI will help fuel our ability to serve more clients. As prospects and clients increasingly use consumer AI tools for research, we are making sure Schwab will be there,” Wurster said. 

"AI will help us with our second growth lever, deepening existing client relationships. AI can help us create personalized and deeper relationships with the clients we can't currently serve at scale with one-to-one relationships. 

"We know investors are using AI today. 77% of U.S. investors use AI today, though more than 90% still prefer human involvement in addition to AI. 

“Next month, we will begin the rollout of portfolio insights, an AI-enabled experience that will deliver tailored insights to our clients about their investment portfolios, how they are performing relative to indices, the news about their holdings and the relevant proprietary research from Schwab.

"We have already tested this capability with employees. We will expand these capabilities throughout 2026, providing clients with insights on topics like concentration risk, asset allocation and technical indicators.”

Scaling with trust

Wealth.com was founded as an estate planning tool, but CEO ane Co-Founder Rafael Loureiro acknowledged that the challenge goes way beyond generational wealth transfers – and that his company is rising to the challenge along with Schwab.

“Wealth management technology is being rebuilt in real time,” he said.

“The old model, characterized by fragmented tools, manual analysis and inconsistent advice, cannot keep up with what advisors and clients now expect. 

"The next generation of firms will be defined by their ability to scale expertise with technological precision and trust.

"Wealth.com is building that platform, and over the past year alone, has been deployed by the nation’s largest RIA, the largest broker-dealer and the largest custodian.”

AI interaction

 Wurster – almost as if he knew what was on skeptics' minds – also addressed how Schwab will use AI directly with clients.

"Starting over the summer, we will introduce the first of several AI assistants that will enable our clients to interact with chat and voice to address their most frequent service and support needs. Our first iteration of the Investor AI assistant will launch in June. 

“This capability will be able to answer general questions, and we will start to test a set of actions the agent can take on behalf of clients. For example, clients will be able to interact with the voice agent to set beneficiaries. 

"We're ensuring clear handoffs to human agents and strict guardrails. This agent and others like it will get smarter with each release as we introduce new skills.”

Creating opportunities

Wurster promised more news on delivering AI agent, too – in addition to the immediate tie-in with Wealth.com.

“We are working with a leading AI agent firm on this build-out and look forward to sharing more details soon. We are also now able to meet our clients' trust needs with an AI-powered capability from Wealth.com.,” he said. 

“We will do the same with tax. Over time, these efforts will create opportunities for enhanced experiences and new fee-based offers that will create value we believe our clients will be willing to pay for.”

The good news is that agentic help can be monetized.

“According to research, more than half of our clients are willing to pay for AI financial tools,” Wurster says. 

It may take more than that to make investors feel confident on today's era of artificial intelligence, Dundi says..

"Step-changes on single tasks don’t move the market anymore. Reimagining the operating model does.

“The next repricing event comes when someone automates an entire segment end-to-end: financial planning through portfolio construction through trade execution, in one auditable workflow that’s demonstrably better than the human version it replaces.”