ThrivAI is an AI strategy and implementation firm built for RIAs and independent advisory firms. We help firms identify the work worth changing, build the right workflows, establish governance, and put the changes into daily use. Success is measured in the firm’s operating results: capacity recovered, service improved, and financial value realized after costs.
Aaron Steinberg has spent 17 years serving advisors from nearly every seat at the table.
Starting his career in 2009 in the RIA custody space — and staying for twelve years, through three acquisitions as the firm became E*TRADE Advisor Services, then part of Morgan Stanley, then Axos. He rose from managing advisor relationships to running national sales and relationship management for the entire custodian, leading the firm to record growth quarters along the way. Living through three integrations taught him something no case study can: how advisory firms actually absorb change — what makes advisors stay, adopt, and grow through disruption, and what makes them quietly disengage.
From there he joined DeVoe & Company, the leading M&A and valuation consultancy in the RIA space, advising firm owners on what actually drives enterprise value. Then LPL Financial, where as Senior Vice President he ran the nation's largest corporate RIA — roughly 11,000 advisors and $560 billion in assets — and led LPL's RIA custody business, competing head-to-head with Schwab and Fidelity for the loyalty of independent firms.
Custodian. M&A advisor. Platform executive. Three different vantage points, one constant: thousands of conversations with advisors, from solo practitioners to billion-dollar firms, about how they run their businesses and where their time actually goes.
Across those seventeen years, Aaron watched thousands of firms buy technology — and only a fraction turn it into sustained business value. The pattern was never the software. It was the absence of workflows, accountability, and adoption discipline around it.
ThrivAI applies that operating experience to AI delivery. An effective implementation must fit the firm’s economics, technology, review requirements, and capacity for change. That means clear ownership, a practical rollout, and measures that show whether the new process is working.
The work starts where advisor capacity is being lost — meeting preparation, follow-ups, CRM updates, research, documentation, task management. AI drafts and prepares the work. Advisors keep the judgment, the client relationships, and final control. The result is capacity for more households, better service, and stronger compliance evidence — without automatically adding headcount. And because Aaron spent years helping owners understand valuation, every engagement is framed the way a buyer would frame it: capacity, consistency, and documented process are enterprise value.
"I've watched advisors get sold technology for seventeen years. The firms that won weren't the ones with the best tools — they were the ones that actually changed how they worked. AI is the biggest capacity opportunity this industry has ever seen, and it will be wasted the exact same way unless someone owns the execution. That's the job."