The scene plays out in family offices from Greenwich to Geneva, in slightly different variations but with a familiar arc. A junior analyst — often the founder’s grandchild, or close to it — has spent the last six months running investment memos through an AI summarization tool. The results are good. Hours of work compressed into minutes. The CIO is impressed. Then the principal finds out what data has been flowing through the system, and the conversation stops.
“Data privacy is non-negotiable,” family office principals told Citi Institute researchers. “AI solutions that cannot guarantee data security are unlikely to be adopted.”
The problem, as a sweeping new report from the institute makes clear, is that in many cases they already have been.
The report, based on in-depth interviews with single-family office principals and CIOs across North America, Europe, Asia and Latin America, captures a generational cold war playing out inside the world’s most secretive financial institutions. On one side: founding-generation principals who have spent decades constructing privacy architectures around their wealth. On the other: a younger cohort — junior analysts, third-generation family members, grandchildren of founders — who are AI-native, impatient, and convinced that the future of wealth management is lean, automated, and built on large language models.
