How advice firms can use AI safely in research, reporting & client communications

Throughout the week in our In Focus series, we’ll be looking at how financial advice firms are using, and can use, artificial intelligence (AI) in ways that are practical, responsible and commercially valuable. 

Alan Gurung, CEO of AdvisoryAI, sets out how AI can reduce the administrative burden on advisers while keeping them firmly in control and compliant.

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. 

The question I kept hearing from firms was straightforward: can AI actually help with this and keep us FCA-compliant?

It can, if the adviser stays in control at every stage. Here’s how that works across research, reporting, and client communications.

Safe means the adviser stays in the loop

According to FCA guidelines, compliance comes down to one thing: can you show that your advice is in the client’s best interest? Every suitability report, every annual review, every recommendation letter traces back to the client’s circumstances, objectives, and risk profile. 

AI can fix that but only if it’s set up as a co-pilot. Not autopilot. Not a black box. To meet compliance standards, the adviser drafts less, reviews more, and stays in control at every stage.

The adviser+AI workflow we’ve built has three stages. First, AI pulls together the inputs: CRM data, the fact-find, the meeting transcript, fund performance data. Instead of the adviser hunting through five systems for the numbers they need, everything relevant lands in one place. This helps speed up research and also ensures that the underlying sources of the data remain the same. 

From there, AI drafts the report. A suitability letter, an annual review, a recommendation, structured to the firm’s format, populated with the data it gathered. Every figure cites its source, so that when the adviser opens that draft, they can see exactly where each piece of information came from.

Then the adviser, the paraplanning team & the compliance team reviews, edits, and signs off the initial AI output. You know the client best. You know their circumstances changed last month. You know what needs updating before the recommendation makes sense. Finally, AI drafts the email summaries & follow-ups built on your tonality with content from the meeting notes that it wrote from the conversation you had. The added advantage is that AI does not miss any reference. Everything gets captured. 

During this entire process, firms are in control as all advice teams are in the loop and constantly reviewing what is created. AI is not perfect, just like a junior paraplanner’s work. Reviewing AI outputs follows the same process, except the first draft arrives in minutes, not hours.

Also, your client data stays on UK servers throughout, pulling directly from the tools you already run: your back-office system, your cashflow platform, your CRM. No exporting sensitive client information into a separate system. The data stays where you manage it, under the governance you already have.

The firms that start now compound the advantage

Most firms we work with start with one use case: a suitability report drafted by AI, reviewed by the adviser. As confidence builds, they expand to annual review letters, LOA pack processing, client follow-up emails. Each additional use case multiplies the time reclaimed.

One firm went from spending four hours on a suitability report to 45 minutes. That changes how many clients an adviser can serve in a week.

The firms doing this now are also building institutional knowledge that’s hard to replicate. They’re learning which outputs they trust, where they need to edit, how to configure the AI for their specific advice style. Six months of that makes a material difference. A firm starting today would spend months catching up.

92% of the UK population makes life-changing financial decisions (pensions, mortgages, inheritance) without professional advice. We’d go to court with a lawyer without question. Yet we navigate money, our number one source of stress, completely alone. That’s an injustice. When a suitability report takes four hours, firms can only serve so many people. Cut that to 45 minutes and the economics shift. More people get access to advice that was previously out of reach.

The firms figuring this out now will compound the advantage and help close the advice gap at the same time.

Make it yours

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.