Throughout the week in our In Focus series, we examine how firms across the financial advice industry are using, and can use, artificial intelligence (AI) in ways that are practical, responsible and commercially viable.
In the newest feature of our In Focus AI series, we asked industry professionals a key question: Where can AI provide real value in financial advice? Their answers highlight areas where the technology helps improve efficiency and accuracy. This includes reducing administrative tasks, enhancing oversight, and allowing for more scalable processes. At the same time, contributors emphasise the need for clear governance, transparency, and human judgement. Altogether, their insights show an industry that is carefully evaluating AI, looking into its practical benefits today while staying realistic about its long-term effects.
Robbie Homer-Plews, Chief Client Officer, Aveni commented:
“We are consistently told that the real value in advice is in the relationship between the adviser and their clients, the time spent engaging human to human. Yet the reality of the role includes a significant administrative burden before and after every meeting. That is where AI delivers its greatest impact: taking on documentation, meeting notes, suitability report collation and compliance admin.
“In practice, AI-generated meeting notes typically reduce production time by around 75%. Across ongoing advice meetings, firms report saving 1–1.5 hours per meeting, with meaningful efficiencies in new client meetings as well. For many advisers, that equates to several hours of capacity reclaimed each week.
“At firm level, the impact compounds quickly. A 20-adviser business, each saving 1.5 hours across ten weekly client meetings, can reclaim around 1,200 hours per month. That time that can be reinvested into client relationships, new business activity and revenue generation.
“All that said, AI isn’t magic. It needs clean processes, human oversight and cultural buy-in. But when deployed thoughtfully, it doesn’t replace advisers. It gives them back the time to deepen relationships, improve outcomes, and deliver more personalised advice. That is where the real value lies.”
Joshua Knight, Head of Product, Dynamic Planner said:
“For advice firms, the opportunity is significant, but careful thought and planning is needed to ensure that the benefits are realised in a way that is scalable and sustainable. The firms making the most progress are not chasing novelty. They are focusing on specific pain points in the advice process, applying AI where it removes administrative burden, and retaining clear human oversight throughout. Advice is an inherently human pursuit – and so with that, AI’s most immediate contributions are in empowering and streamlining the trusted human advice that clients value from their advisers.”
Karen Barrett, CEO and founder of Unbiased, commented:
“The recent market jitters over AI are unsurprising, especially when you see market fears about technology replacing human expertise,
“However, at Unbiased, we believe the real risk isn’t embracing AI but failing to harness its true potential. We see AI not as a replacement for advisers, but as the engine for their growth.
“This isn’t just a theory for us; it’s our strategy. We are actively building the intelligence layer that will power the next decade of financial advice. Our new AI-enabled tool, SmartAccept, is the first tangible proof of this vision. It’s not a robo-adviser. It’s a growth assistant that learns an adviser’s unique preferences and automates client acquisition, securing the right prospects for them even outside of working hours.
“This is how AI can directly fuel growth. Embracing automation and harnessing the power of AI frees up advisers to focus on the irreplaceable human element of their work. The future is about combining the efficiency of technology with the unparalleled judgment of an expert adviser, making trusted guidance both scalable and accessible.”
Mike Morris, Director of Proposition and Marketing at Origen Financial Services, said:
“Looking ahead, we can imagine a landscape where financial advice dissolves its traditional boundaries and becomes an ambient, always‑on service delivered seamlessly through personal devices.
“AI‑driven systems, embedded across banks, pension providers, investment platforms and emerging third‑party ecosystems, will continually interpret the rhythm of our daily lives. Every transaction, lifestyle choice, and behavioural cue will be dynamically assessed against a personalised set of needs, wants and long‑term aspirations – not just for individuals, but for families and even multi‑generational planning.
“In this vision, advice is no longer a scheduled event or a ‘job to be done.’ It becomes a constant companion. Automation handles the commoditised layer – modelling, monitoring, and recalibrating in real time. As that foundation strengthens, the role of the human adviser evolves into something far more profound.
“Advisers become cognitive guides: professionals who help clients navigate deeper questions of identity, purpose and legacy. Their value shifts from transactional execution to meaningful challenge, reflection and direction. Advisory teams refocus around curiosity, behavioural insight, ethical judgement, and the ability to translate rich data intelligence into human‑centred wisdom.
“Rather than replacing advisers, AI creates the conditions for them to operate at their highest level – unlocking a future where the profession’s core contribution isn’t information, but transformation. AI won’t replace advisers; it will liberate them to guide clients toward clarity, purpose and legacy.”
Suman Rao UK Managing Director at Avaloq, says:
“While wealth managers see AI as integral to the future of their work and the industry, many clients are unconvinced about its role in investment decisions and financial planning. Bridging this gap will be critical for wealth managers looking to reap the true benefits AI can offer.
“The human touch will always be important to clients and it may be that we are seeing their broader concerns about AI’s impact on the way we work and live filtering through. But the efficiency and decision-making benefits that AI provides should not be overlooked and wealth managers must take proactive steps to reassure clients about how it is best used. That includes embedding transparency, accountability and strong human oversight into AI-driven solutions.”
Steve Nelson, insight director at the lang cat, said:
“AI discourse is everywhere and with SOTAN, we wanted to make sure we understood how it was affecting the advice sector.
“What is clear is there is an appetite and an application for its use within advice firms, with usage doubling from last year.
“Firms are finding it useful for administration, meeting notes, data handling and report drafting. However, there is still a reticence about using it for client-facing tasks or for anything that’d lessen the involvement of human judgement.
“Where we are seeing nervousness around adoption, despite AI being available, affordable and increasingly capable, is in a lack of regulatory frameworks to ease adviser’s minds where there are understandable concerns around regulation and compliance.
“Firms lack shared norms around acceptable use and if there was more direction in this area, this may lead to greater levels of comfort in adoption.
“It is also worth noting that over a third registered that they were uncomfortable on some level with data security when using AI in financial advice.
“As much as we’re seeing the welcoming of innovation, it’s important that development doesn’t come at the expense of other critical elements like data security.
“This is obviously all moving at a fast pace, but it certainly looks like AI in one way, shape or form will continue to play a role in advice.”
Chanelle Paynter, Associate Research Director, NextWealth, commented:
“It is tempting to frame AI as a path to unconstrained scaling. Some anecdotal stories suggest advisers could theoretically service vastly expanded client banks.
“In theory, yes, technology can support far larger client-per-adviser servicing. But advice thrives on the strength of advisers’ relationships with clients, not just sheer volume.
“Advisers speak about using AI to “doing the heavy lifting behind the scenes” so planners and paraplanners can spend more time with clients. The future ambition then should be to integrate further efficiencies without degrading the client experience.
“If 84% of users are already seeing efficiency gains, the real question is what advisers will do with that capacity. Will they simply add more clients at the same service level? Or will they deepen relationships, improve communication and raise standards?
“AI is already proving it can handle menial tasks and save time. Successful automation will unshackle what is uniquely human about financial advice. But the next step should not be ‘AI-fying’ every process.
“The firms that succeed will likely be those that treat AI not as a bolt-on productivity hack, but as a tool to unlock the human value of their businesses.”
Andrea MacDonald,Partner at Saturn,said:
“AI is only as good as the data it ingests. Most advice firms have years of inconsistent fact finds, PDFs, handwritten notes and fragmented CRM records accumulated across different systems and different advisers. Getting this right unlocks everything that follows, which is why the firms making the most progress treat data as the foundation, not an afterthought.
“This is also where the right technology partner makes a material difference. Data remediation isn’t a one-off project to complete before the real work begins. It’s the starting point of a longer transformation, and it looks different for every firm depending on their back-office setup, how long they’ve been operating and how consistently data has been captured over the years.
“The firms that navigate this well aren’t the ones with the cleanest data going in. They’re the ones working with a partner who understands the shape of the problem, helps them prioritise what to tackle first and builds alongside them iteratively, rather than handing over a system and stepping back.
“Getting this foundation right is what separates firms that see genuine compounding efficiency gains from those that end up with a faster version of the same mess. The transformation is real, but it’s a journey. The partner you choose should be willing to make it with you.”
Alan Gurung, CEO of AdvisoryAI, says:
“I became a financial adviser because I wanted to help people. Instead, I spent 50% of my time writing suitability letters, updating CRM records, and chasing meeting notes I’d put off since Monday. Most advisers I speak to describe the same thing. You trained to advise. You ended up administrating.
“That admin burden has a compliance cost too. Every suitability report, every annual review letter has to demonstrate that the advice is in the client’s best interest, with a clear audit trail behind every recommendation. When advisers are stretched thin on documentation, that’s where quality slips.
“Clients pay for a personal service. They chose their adviser because of how that adviser communicates, the care they show, the relationship built over years. A follow-up email that sounds generic, off the shelf, tells the client they’re just another name in a queue. Nobody wants that. Your clients don’t want that!
“However, AI that builds from your existing document formats, your suitability letter templates, your communication style keeps the personal relationship intact. The adviser still reviews and approves everything, and the output reads the way the client expects it to.
“That’s our vision for the adviser/AI relationship; a co-pilot that brings financial advice to more people, and gives advisers more late nights back.”
Jodie Gallagher, Head of UK IFA Product at FE fundinfo, commented:
“Right now, AI’s core benefit is in revolutionising the flow of an adviser’s daily work. AI is transformative in helping advisers to rapidly identify their most important work, helping them service clients more efficiently and open up more capacity for personalisation. Just consider one task: research and analysis. When retirement projections or portfolio comparisons can be generated in minutes rather than hours, advisers are instantly freed up to focus on long-term planning and suitability.
“The real benefit is not just speed, but clarity. AI can pull together product information in a way that makes it easier to challenge assumptions and clearly explain why one recommendation is more appropriate than another, which is crucial to Consumer Duty requirements. Siloed workflows are a thing of the past now for advisers. AI helps aggregate and synthesize data from many sources for advisers, from meetings, to documents to digital fact finds, driving clear and evidenced insights advisers can take to their clients.
“At the same time, AI does not shift accountability away from the adviser. Clients will still expect clear reasoning and confidence behind a recommendation, which means the foundations behind that recommendation must be robust. The insight AI generates is only as strong as the data it draws on. Where disclosures are inconsistent or methodologies differ, automation will simply magnify those weaknesses rather than correct them.”
“Where advisers are working from consistent, high-quality data, AI becomes a genuine enhancer of advice. When the underlying information is aligned, the insight AI produces can elevate the advice process and strengthen client confidence. Its value ultimately rests on data that advisers, and their clients, can trust.”
