Brown Advisory · $174B AUM · Executive Offsite
Fourteen Brown Advisory leaders, two days, one ranked AI roadmap
Brown Advisory wanted every senior leader to understand AI and agree on where to start. Fourteen office heads and operating officers came into a two-day offsite with fourteen different opinions. They left with a ranked pilot list, an owner and a success metric on every item, and a shared conviction about what AI means for a firm built on judgment.
Client
Brown Advisory
Industry
Investment Management · $174B AUM
Engagement
Two-day executive offsite
The starting point
Brown Advisory is a private investment management firm with $174 billion under management. Like most firms of its scale, it did not lack AI opinions: it lacked alignment. Fourteen office heads focused on business development and operating officers running daily execution needed to get on the same page, across three distinct businesses (strategic advisory covering tax and estate work, client service, and portfolio management). No one agreed on the starting point.
The risk in that position is not moving too slowly. It is that each group pilots something different, nothing compounds, and eighteen months later the firm has a drawer of proofs-of-concept and no strategy.
The preparation did half the work
Before anyone walked into the room, every attendee submitted their biggest time-wasters through a structured pre-work system. AI sorted more than one hundred submissions into themes overnight. The agenda came from the firm’s own pain, not from a consultant’s template.
The two groups also got separate sessions before they combined: office heads worked on use cases tied to business development, operating officers on use cases tied to daily execution. Mixing them on day one would have wasted both groups’ time.
The demos ran on real firm data
Senior advisors watched AI read a real, anonymized client tax-and-estate matter and produce a finished brief in six minutes. That is a document a senior advisor used to spend a full day writing.
Portfolio managers watched AI read a set of manager commentary letters, spot contradictions across quarters, and flag the most important question to ask. Before AI, that was a multi-week junior analyst project.
Generic demos produce polite interest. Demos on your own matters, in front of the people who do the work today, produce conviction. The skepticism in the room did not survive day one.
“A brief a senior advisor used to spend a full day writing was produced in six minutes, on a real matter, in front of the people who write them. That demo changed the room.”
Alignment that survived the flight home
Day two produced a ranked pilot list spanning all three business areas, agreed by the full leadership group. Every pilot left the room with an owner, a deadline, and a success metric. Post-session interviews with department heads converted the pilot ideas into actionable plans.
Offsite energy usually dies on the flight home. The structure here (pre-work, tailored tracks, real-data demos, then forced prioritization with named owners) is what kept it alive.
Where it goes from here
The offsite opened a multi-workstream relationship with the firm. The pattern generalizes to any professional services firm whose product is judgment: the constraint on AI is never the technology, it is getting the people who own the P&L aligned on what to build first. Two well-designed days can do what a year of scattered pilots cannot.