Part 1 of 2 | The Digitally Enabled Adviser Series
For years, the financial advice industry has talked about the advice gap. Millions of Australians who need professional guidance but cannot access it — priced out, underserved, or simply not knowing where to start. The response has largely been regulatory: the Quality of Advice Review, scaled advice frameworks, and ongoing debate about how to make professional advice more accessible.
While that conversation has continued, something else has been quietly filling the gap.
New research from Anthropic, published in late March, gives us the first detailed picture of how Australians are actually using AI. To give an example, Australia accounts for 1.6% of global Claude traffic. Adjusted for population size, Australians use Claude more than four times what our working-age population would predict, placing us seventh globally in per capita adoption.
This is not a niche behaviour. It is mainstream. And the types of tasks Australians are using AI for, tell an important story.
Financial guidance is already happening — just not with advisers
When Anthropic mapped Australian usage against global benchmarks, financial guidance emerged as one of the most overrepresented categories — above the global average by 1.3 percentage points across millions of conversations.
This is the advice gap being filled. Not by another advice firm. Not by a robo-advice platform. By a general-purpose AI that any Australian can access for free, at 11pm, without an appointment.
Figure 1: Request clusters most over- and under-represented in Australia vs global average. Source: Anthropic Economic Index, February 2026.
Within Australia, Claude usage is heavily concentrated. New South Wales and Victoria together account for 68% of all conversations, with both states recording above-average per capita adoption.
Figure 2: Share of Claude.ai usage by Australian state and territory. Source: Anthropic Economic Index, February 2026.
How Australians are measuring up
The below chart compares Australia against three similar English-speaking countries across four different dimensions of how people use AI.
Work use vs Personal use — roughly half of all Claude conversations in Australia are work-related (46%), and half are personal (47%). The split is similar across all four countries, so Australians aren't unusual here, and it confirms AI is being used for real, everyday decisions, not just for novelty.
AI Autonomy (1–5 scale) — this measures how much people delegate to AI versus collaborate with it. Australia scores 3.38, toward the lower end, meaning Australians tend to use AI as a thinking partner rather than just asking it to do things for them. Again, similar to the UK and Canada.
Prompt complexity — measured in years of schooling equivalents, this shows how sophisticated the questions people are actually asking are. Australia sits at around 11.9 years, on par with our peers.
Figure 3: Australia vs Anglosphere peers across four economic primitives. Source: Anthropic Economic Index, .February 2026.
The data shows that Australia isn't an outlier in how it uses AI — we use it thoughtfully and collaboratively, much like comparable economies. What makes us stand out is how we over-index on financial guidance: a clear signal that using AI for financial guidance is fast becoming mainstream.
The post-Hayne reality accelerated this
The Royal Commission fundamentally changed the shape of the advice industry. Adviser numbers fell sharply. Compliance costs rose. Many practices moved upmarket — focusing on higher-net-worth clients who could justify the fee. Affordable, accessible advice for everyday Australians became harder to find, not easier.
That created a vacuum. And vacuums get filled.
The Australians turning to AI for financial guidance are everyday people trying to figure out whether to fix their mortgage, how much they should be putting into super, whether they can afford to invest on a modest income. The questions advisers answer every day — being answered, in some form, by AI.
Implications for the advice practice
Australia's AI autonomy score sits at 3.38 out of 5 — toward the lower end of the scale. Australians are not outsourcing their financial thinking to AI. They are using it to think better. To understand their options, test their assumptions, and arrive at a conversation with more clarity than they would have had otherwise.
This means clients who ultimately seek professional advice are arriving better informed. They have done their homework. They have specific questions. For advisers who understand this dynamic, it changes how the first conversation should run.
There are three key implications for the advice practice:
01 Client conversations have changed | Clients arriving at an initial meeting have often already spent time with AI. Meeting them where they are, rather than starting from first principles, is increasingly the expectation. The adviser who asks "what have you already looked into?" will run a better first meeting. |
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02 Confident misconceptions are a new risk | When AI-generated financial guidance is wrong or oversimplified, it creates clients with confident misconceptions. Advisers who build the habit of exploring what clients have already researched will catch more of the latter. |
03 The value proposition needs to be explicit | The advice gap is being partially addressed — not by the industry. That should prompt a harder question about what professional advice offers that AI genuinely cannot: accountability, legal responsibility, personalised strategy, and long-term relationships. |
What comes next
The research captures a moment in time. But the behaviour it documents, Australians turning to AI for financial guidance at above-global rates, is not a trend that peaks and reverses. It deepens.
The clients in your next review meeting have almost certainly already had a conversation with AI about their situation. They may not have mentioned it. But they arrived better informed, with sharper questions, and with a clearer sense of what they think they need.
That changes the job.
Not in a way that diminishes the value of professional advice, but in a way that demands it be delivered differently. Faster to the insight. More responsive to what the client already knows. Clearer about what you offer that no AI can replicate: accountability, responsibility, and a relationship that holds through the hard moments, not just the interesting ones.
The practices that understand this shift are already pulling ahead. The question is whether yours is one of them.
Coming in Part 2
The Digitally Enabled Adviser: A Practical Roadmap
The specific steps advisers can take — right now — to stay relevant as client behaviour continues to shift. A four-stage maturity model with honest signals and clear next moves at every level.
Sources
- How Australia Uses Claude — Anthropic Economic Index — Anthropic, March 2026
- Investment Trends 2025 Financial Advice Report — Investment Trends / Money Management, December 2025
- FAAA Demands Recognition of Adviser Skill Shortage — Financial Newswire, March 2026
- Australian Financial Advisers at the Forefront of AI Adoption — FAAA / FPSB Global Research, May 2025
- Young, Motivated and Missing Out: Australia's Advice Gap Leaves a Generation Locked Out — Council of Australian Life Insurers, July 2025
- Can Australia Fix Its Financial Advice Problem and Lower Costs? — Money Magazine, February 2026
