St. Petersburg, Fla., Sept. 08, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Raymond James announced today the appointment of David Solganik as head of AI strategy. This newly created role underscores the firm’s commitment to strategically integrating artificial intelligence (AI) across its businesses – augmenting the human touch, rather than replacing it.

The focus is on delivering data-driven insights, enhancing service models and developing secure, scalable applications that empower financial advisors, investment bankers and home office associates to optimize their time and talents in order to serve clients with even greater efficiency and impact.

“While we believe personal relationships will always be at the heart of our business, Raymond James has a multi-year commitment to embed AI into tools and applications across the firm,” said CEO Paul Shoukry. “We will continue to make meaningful investments in AI as part of our $975 million annual technology budget.”

Solganik will help shape the firm’s AI strategy by identifying cross-business opportunities where advanced analytics, machine learning, and generative AI can drive growth and elevate the client experience.

“David brings deep expertise in implementing AI strategies at scale and building AI into desktop tools,” said Vin Campagnoli, executive vice president, Technology and Operations. “That expertise is backed by senior leadership experience that will guide how we implement AI-driven solutions that optimize processes and deepen client relationships.”

Hiring Solganik marks another key milestone in the firm’s ongoing investment in AI capabilities and accelerating growth. Earlier this year, Stuart Feld was promoted to chief AI officer , serving as principal architect for the firm’s AI strategy. Solganik reports to Feld, reinforcing a leadership structure focused on innovation.

Recent advancements include:

  • An AI search function that enables financial advisors and associates to ask intuitive, natural language questions of the firm’s vast internal knowledge base and intranet.
  • Zoom Meeting Summary , which automatically generates comprehensive overviews and action items from Zoom meetings.
  • An AI Note Assistant within our proprietary CRM that organizes and summarizes the content of a note, including pulling out key action items and next steps. A soon-to-be-released GenAI-enhanced speech-to-text tool will take note-taking a step further, quickly capturing dictated thoughts and automatically generating a well-structured CRM note.

Other AI-enhanced tools are embedded in advisors’ everyday applications, including Opportunities and Advisor Access , where many advisors start their day, use machine learning to predict and recommend actions based on a user’s patterns.

AI is also being leveraged across cybersecurity, electronic communications review, operational monitoring and feedback. Central to everything is the safe adoption of AI, ensuring solutions are transparent, well-governed and aligned with the firm’s culture of trust, security and regulatory compliance.

“There’s an immense opportunity to reduce administrative tasks for financial advisors and associates, freeing up more time to focus on serving clients,” said Solganik. “To successfully integrate AI across the firm, education and adoption are critical. Our team is partnering with training and delivery experts to launch firm-wide education programs that increase AI awareness and usage.”

Solganik brings more than 30 years of experience leading AI, data and analytics organizations and initiatives across financial services companies, including Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase and MetLife. He joins Raymond James after three years as head of U.S. wealth management AI and data strategic initiatives at RBC.

About Raymond James Financial, Inc.

Raymond James Financial, Inc. (NYSE: RJF) is a leading diversified financial services company providing private client group, capital markets, asset management, banking and other services to individuals, corporations and municipalities. Total client assets are $1.65 trillion. Public since 1983, the firm is listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol RJF. Additional information is available at www.raymondjames.com.