AI is transforming every corner of financial services, but rather than replacing advisers, many believe it has the potential to strengthen the value of professional advice. In this exclusive insight for IFA Magazine, John Miller, Director and Principal Broker at Miller & Partner, shares why he sees AI as an opportunity rather than a threat, arguing that while technology can streamline routine tasks, human expertise, judgement and trusted relationships will remain at the heart of great advice.
I am a commercial insurance broker, not a financial adviser, so I will admit up front that I am a guest in your world here. But I believe we have far more in common than the labels suggest, and the thing that convinced me of it is artificial intelligence, or the way it has been quietly rewriting both our trades while the headlines would make us fear otherwise.
AI is changing the advice landscape, not replacing it
Back in February, an AI insurance shopping app launched in the USA, listed insurance broker shares took a nosedive, and some of the big names had their worst day on the markets since 2008. This sent shockwaves across the pond, hitting some of the biggest insurance comparison sites here in Blighty.
The story was that the machines had finally come for the middlemen. And if you advise for a living, you have almost certainly seen the same headline written about you. As someone who is, technically, one of those middlemen, I saw it more as an opportunity rather than a death knell.
Ever the optimist, I have always felt the way things were done was going the way of the Dodo, and those who embrace the new are the ones who win.
When an AI tool or a comparison engine handles an insurance request, it does one thing well, it processes easy, standardised risks. A car, a shop, a straightforward office. Feed in the details, match them to an appetite then get a price.
That work is becoming a commodity, and good luck to it and those who run these businesses. It’s always a race to the bottom on premium, and not one I ever wanted to win.
Your world has the same fault line running through it. The straightforward pension transfer, the vanilla ISA, the plain bit of protection – that is the work software is learning to do cheaply, and competing on price for it is a race I doubt you want to win either.
Why human expertise still matters
The risks that built my firm, Miller & Partner, are precisely the ones those systems reject. The business with a County Court Judgment or a poor credit score. The directors trading on after a liquidation, rebuilding under a new entity, who get a flat “computer says no” everywhere they go.
The specialist trades like welding, foundry work, CNC machining, powder coating – trades that an algorithm cannot understand well enough to price. Heat networks, commercial flood, biohazard cleaning, professional indemnity for awkward professions.
Over the last couple of years I have built Miller & Partner around exactly these cases, because when a risk is hard to place, that is when a human broker beats a robot. An algorithm runs from a problem like that. I tend to run towards it. You will have your own version of these.
The client whose circumstances are tangled, the income that never arrives in tidy monthly lines, the history no risk questionnaire was ever built to read. The detail differs but the principle is identical, the moment a case stops fitting the template is the moment it needs a person rather than a process.
Using AI to enhance productivity and client service
So, when people ask whether AI frightens me, my honest answer is no, I embrace it. I try and scrape every last ounce of value from it, for the sole purpose of building my brand better, faster and setting me apart from those who it does scare.
If you listen to the big brokers rather than the share price, they are more grounded on the subject. On their recent earnings calls they described AI not as a replacement but as a friend, something to sharpen analytics, automate the internal grind and help clients navigate growing complexity.
The genuinely useful applications are often tedious, drafting correspondence, pulling renewal analysis together, tidying data, keeping records straight across insurer portals. In other words, AI is excellent at the admin that takes up a working day.
The judgement that actually wins a difficult case though? It hasn’t got a clue. The industry’s own research is proof of this — most insurers believe AI will dominate their future, yet only a small fraction have made it work for them the way they should. The market is splitting into those using it to clear the mundane work and those still stuck in their ways.
And it is probably an obvious statement to make, but I strongly believe those that adopt and change, survive, and even thrive. (Just don’t tell the other insurance brokers about it for a while!)
Here is where your world and mine line up almost exactly, and where I think advisers are, if anything, a step ahead of brokers.
I have actually used AI to do some research for this article, and it says that more than half of UK financial advisers are already using AI, mostly for the same things, meeting notes, client communication, preparation etc. And it is easy to see why.
An adviser’s day, like a broker’s, is eaten by writing up reports and satisfying compliance. Producing a single financial plan still takes the best part of a working day. You are reaching for AI to get that time back so you can sit in front of clients instead of a keyboard.
It is the same idea pointing the same way for both of us — let the technology take the routine, and reinvest the hours it frees where human expertise truly counts.
Consumer Duty means accountability remains with advisers
There is a regulatory line underneath all of this too, and as fellow FCA authorised firms we are bound by the same rules. The regulator has been clear that AI will be policed through the existing rulebook and the Consumer Duty, not some separate AI statute.
Whatever a tool drafts or summarises, the advice, the suitability and the outcome remain yours and will always be human. Responsibility does not transfer to software — and I would argue we shouldn’t want it to, because that responsibility is precisely the thing that makes us worth paying for isn’t it?
Why trusted advice will always have a place
That is the point I came here to make. AI is commoditising the simple, transactional layer of both our professions, and that is uncomfortable for anyone whose role is the unglamorous stuff, the admin and the mundane.
But it is simultaneously raising the worth of everything it cannot do. It takes a human to size up a situation that does not fit the template, to build a solution around it, to read what is buried in the small print, and to be the steady voice when a client needs one.
So don’t see it as a barrier to your role moving forward. See it as a tool to raise your game and, most importantly, your worth as an adviser, which I believe can only grow in parallel to the innovation.
So I would gently push back on the doom mongers. The advisers and brokers who come out of this era stronger won’t be the ones who dug their heels in. They’ll be the ones who picked it up and used it to elevate their business above those who refused to break old habits.
And if one of your clients ever turns up with a commercial risk nobody else will touch, it is worth knowing there is still a broker at the end of a phone who treats that as a challenge rather than a problem. But the bigger point is the one I will leave you with.
Whatever AI ends up doing, and it will do plenty, the professional who can sit with a client, weigh a situation no template accounts for and own the outcome only becomes harder to replace, not easier. That holds for brokers, it holds for advisers, and I suspect it will hold long after the current excitement has settled.
The technology was never the threat. Being the kind of professional people trust enough to come back to is the whole game, and it always was.
