The Operating System Powering Our Culture

Last week, we shared an important milestone for Advisor360°: the launch of Advisor360° Wealth OS, our AI-native advisor experience designed to help advisory firms of every size, model, and stage work smarter, move faster, and spend more time with their clients.

Wealth OS is built on a simple idea: great technology should remove friction, not add to it. By unifying data, workflows, and AI on a single foundation, Wealth OS gives advisors what they value most: time, clarity, and confidence in the decisions they make every day.

As proud as I am of that announcement, I want to share some thoughts about another type of “operating system” that powers our award-winning technology: the individuals driving our culture. Our employees are the living, evolving system that allows us to build solutions that are leading-edge, responsible, and deeply human. It’s the hundreds of people behind the scenes who show up every day to create, question, collaborate, and care.

As we close out the year, three themes stand out as examples of how our people are the power behind our platform.

AI Isn’t a Someday Goal

At Advisor360°, AI isn’t aspirational. It’s something our teams are building, testing, and learning from every day.

This year, we hosted a global hackathon in the middle of our year-end planning cycle with budgets, reviews, and the usual pressures that come with closing one year and opening another. It would have been easy to wait for a better time. Instead, our teams came together across geographies, showing up with curiosity and urgency to turn ideas into working applications in just days.

That experience reinforced something I believe deeply: innovation doesn’t wait for ideal conditions. It thrives in cultures where people feel empowered to experiment, collaborate, and act.

Our approach to AI reflects that mindset. Whether it’s expanding our secure, compliant AI teammate, Parrot AI, or launching our AI-native Wealth OS, our teams are focused on applying AI where it genuinely helps people, not as a bolt-on, but as a thoughtful teammate. That work takes technical excellence, but it also takes judgment, trust, and care.

Aligning Technology With Human Needs

One question we constantly ask ourselves about our advisor experience is: who does this actually help?

Financial advisors don’t need more technology for technology’s sake. They need more time with clients. They need systems that remember the details that matter, like family dynamics, life transitions, and conversations that build trust over years.

When we build technology that elevates and improves the advisor experience, we’re not just solving technical problems. We’re aligning technology with human needs: reducing cognitive load, minimizing busywork, and creating space for meaningful relationships.

That alignment doesn’t happen by accident. It requires teams that deeply understand the advisor experience, respect the realities of compliance and scale, and care about getting the details right. It requires designers, engineers, product managers, and client-facing teams working together with a shared purpose.

This is where our people truly shine. They don’t just build fast; they build with intention.

The Culture Is the Code

When I started my career as a software engineer, I learned how to build systems and debug problems. Then I moved into the People function, and I learned something much harder: you can’t debug trust.

Culture isn’t something you can architect on a whiteboard or enforce through policy alone. It’s shaped by how leaders show up, how teams collaborate under pressure, and whether people feel safe enough to take risks and speak honestly.

That’s why, at Advisor360°, we focus on creating the conditions for great work to happen. We invest in clarity whenever possible, and just as importantly, we trust our people to navigate ambiguity with creativity and accountability.

This year, that commitment showed up in a meaningful shift. We moved away from four high-level values that were difficult to operationalize, and toward eight leadership principles designed to be actionable, empowering, and relevant to how our teams actually work. They serve as shared guardrails to help people make decisions, collaborate effectively, and lead with intention.

Good systems, both technical and human, don’t eliminate complexity. They help people move through it together. Our culture is built on that belief, and it shows up in how our teams design applications, support customers, and help one another.

The Operating System That Matters Most

As we close out 2025, I keep coming back to this idea: operating systems only matter if the people using and building them are thriving.

Wealth OS marks a significant step forward for our platform and for the advisors we serve. But it’s also a reflection of something much deeper. It reflects a company full of engaged, innovative, and thoughtful people who believe that technology should serve humans—not the other way around.

Our employees are the operating system beneath our culture. They are the connective tissue that turns ideas into impact, complexity into clarity, and ambition into real outcomes for our customers. I’m grateful for the trust they build, the space they hold, and the conditions they create for great work to happen.

Dena Upton is Chief People Officer at Advisor360°.

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