For registered advisers
Your notetaker is producing records. Rule 204-2 does not care that nobody sent them.
Rule 204-2 defines a record to include "transcribed information of any type, whether expressed in ordinary or machine language." The rule turns on what a communication is and does, not on who or what produced it — which means a meeting transcript or an AI-generated summary can be a required record even though it was never sent to anyone. The decision that matters is not whether to keep transcripts; it is that the decision has to be made in advance, at the category level, and that retaining everything is not the conservative option. Every retained transcript is a document you may be asked to produce, that you must be able to find, and that has to be consistent with everything else in the file. Two boundaries before we go further: there is no SEC guidance expressly addressing AI-drafted communications under 204-2, and whether a specific transcript at your firm is a required record is your compliance consultant's judgment, not ours.
Why this is now the typical adviser's first production AI system
Sixty-three percent of RIAs use AI tools in some capacity, more than double the 2023 figure. Eighty-two percent of those use generative AI. The dominant uses, by a wide margin, are notetaking and email drafting, and only about one in ten AI-using advisers has fully integrated AI into business strategy (Schwab 2026 RIA & AI Research Study, n=533 RIAs custodying at Schwab, fielded by Logica Research October 7–26, 2025, published January 22, 2026).
So the first AI system in production at most firms joins client meetings, produces a transcript and a summary, and somebody skims the summary, pastes part of it into the CRM and moves on. The transcript stays wherever the vendor put it.
Books and records is the second most commonly reported actual exam focus, at 53%, behind advertising and marketing at 57% (IAA / ACA Group / Yuter Compliance Consulting, 2026 Investment Management Compliance Testing Survey, 411 firms, July 29, 2026). This is not a theoretical exposure.
The rule text, and the two years in the office
Rule 204-2(a)(7) requires originals of all written communications received and copies of all written communications sent relating to any recommendation made or advice given. Rule 204-2(e)(1) requires records to be kept not less than five years from the end of the fiscal year of the last entry, the first two years in an appropriate office of the adviser.
One calendar item: the SEC's July 7, 2026 rulemaking agenda lists amendments to the adviser recordkeeping rule at proposed-rule stage, targeting October 2026. Rule 204-2 may change. That is a reason to make the category decision in a document you can revise, not a reason to wait for the amendment.
Retaining everything is not the conservative choice
The instinct under uncertainty is to keep it all. It feels safe. It is not.
The retention decision should be made in advance and at the category level, and retaining everything is not the conservative option, because unnecessary transcripts give examiners more material to read with no compliance benefit to you (Cooley, TheFundLawyer, April 24, 2026).
A raw transcript of a ninety-minute client meeting contains every half-finished sentence, every aside, and every figure someone said out loud before checking it. If that transcript is a required record, keep it and manage it properly. If it is not, keeping it anyway buys you nothing and costs you surface area.
Categories, not documents — and the configuration has to match
Each category gets a retention period, a location, and a date the decision was made. That date needs to be earlier than the transcripts it governs.
Illustratively, the categories a firm might separate: client meeting summaries used to support advice given; raw audio and verbatim transcripts of those meetings; internal investment or strategy discussions; prospect meetings that never became clients; internal administrative meetings with no client content. Plausibly different treatments. That is the shape of the decision, not a recommendation about your firm — we are not in a position to tell you which category anything falls into.
Then the configuration has to match the decision in two places. In your tenant: Purview retention labels and policies, and your archiving product. And at the vendor: the notetaker's own retention setting, which you will have to go and look at, because the default was chosen for the vendor's convenience rather than for your rule.
The gap between those two is where firms get caught. A retention policy that says ninety days, against a vendor account quietly holding four years of transcripts, is worse than having made no decision — because now your own file contradicts you.
We are not here to replace your notetaker
The adviser notetaker category — Jump, Zocks, Zeplyn, Mili, FinMate, Powder, Sila — is a good category solving a real problem at roughly $60 to $80 per adviser per month and up, with Jump and Zocks leading on satisfaction in Kitces Research's advisor productivity work. Zoom's AI Companion has the highest adoption and the lowest satisfaction there, largely because it does not touch the CRM or the compliance layer at all.
That last detail is the whole story. These tools produce good output. What they do not produce is the file: the dated retention decision, the evidence somebody tested the summaries against the recordings, the written statement of where a human reviews, and the service provider diligence showing the vendor's terms were read. Keep the notetaker. If it is already deployed firm-wide, that is a head start, not a problem.
What to do Monday
- Write down your categories — five or six is plenty — with a retention period and a location for each, and today's date on the document.
- Open the notetaker's admin settings and read the actual retention value. Write it next to your decision.
- Reconcile the two. Change whichever one is wrong, and record that you changed it.
- Ask your compliance consultant the one question that is genuinely theirs: which of these categories relate to a recommendation made or advice given?
- Pull ten summaries at random and compare them against the source. Write down what you find and set a date to do it again.
Where we stop
We give no regulatory advice, we do not assess your policies, and we will not tell you whether a given communication is a required record. Nor do we build anything producing an investment recommendation, a suitability determination or a portfolio decision. We configure the tenant to match the decision you make, build the testing record, document the review point, and keep producing the file.
Signet, a division of Circle Square Consulting. Radnor, Pennsylvania. — signetattest.com/evidence-file