In financial advice, Artificial intelligence (AI) success will be about trust not adoption. AI is moving quickly from experimentation into everyday business. Across industries, organisations are exploring how AI can improve productivity, simplify processes, and create better experiences for customers.
Financial advice is no exception. According to the Investment Trends 2026 Adviser Technology Needs Report, 79% of advisers are already using AI in some form. However, adoption alone does not guarantee value. Advisers are telling us that the next challenge is making AI genuinely useful, with 37% citing inaccurate outputs and 32% identifying limited integration with existing systems as key barriers to unlocking value from AI.
This highlights an important shift. The conversation has moved beyond whether AI will become part of advice, to how we introduce AI in a way that improves advice outcomes, while maintaining the trust that sits at the centre of the profession.
Three forces shaping the future of advice
When we think about the future of advice, there are three forces coming together.
The first is rising expectations for better advice experiences. Clients increasingly expect services that are more personalised, accessible, and responsive - moving seamlessly between online and in-person offline modes. Australians are among the highest adopters of global AI platforms per capita, and doubtless have experimented with generating their own financial plans. Across almost every industry, people have become accustomed to experiences that are simpler, asynchronous, and more tailored to their needs.
While the same applies to advice, it is also different from many industries because its value is not just in collating and delivering information, but in interpretation, judgement, and helping clients make confident decisions. AI has the potential to support this by helping advisers spot patterns, access better insights, improve preparation, and craft more personalised experiences.
The second force is growing pressure on adviser capacity. Advice practices are balancing increasing regulatory requirements, operational complexity, and the need to spend more time in meaningful discussions with clients. This is where we are already seeing practical AI adoption. Data shows advisers are using AI tools to support day-to-day productivity tasks, particularly generating meeting summaries (with 44% using AI extensively in this area) and drafting client communications or emails.
These are valuable applications because they remove friction and allow advisers to focus more time on higher-value work. The next opportunity to grow capacity is moving beyond standalone tools, and orchestrating intelligence within the workflows advisers already use.
The third force is the need for trusted AI adoption. Trust is a confident relationship with the unknown - financial advice is built on it, with clients depending on advisers to help them navigate some of the most important, long-term decisions in their lives. Research from the Governance Institute of Australia’s Ethics Index consistently places financial planners among Australia’s most trusted professions, alongside doctors and accountants.
That trust is a significant advantage, but it is also a responsibility. The industry’s challenge is to ensure AI strengthens the foundations of trust, rather than unintentionally weakening them. This means being deliberate about where AI is applied: solving real client problems, embedding appropriate governance, maintaining human accountability, and being transparent about how technology supports the advice experience.
Moving beyond the AI hype
For leaders, one of the biggest challenges right now is separating genuine opportunity from noise. Some commentators suggest AI will transform every industry immediately, while others question whether the upside will justify the investment.
The reality is somewhere in between. AI is powerful, but it is still evolving. The organisations that succeed in adopting AI will not necessarily be those that move fastest, but those that understand where AI solves real problems, and where the foundations need to improve first. The key measure of progress with AI in your business is learning - requiring an operating model that is based on testing and continuous knowledge growth.
A lesson we keep coming back to is: make haste slowly. Be ambitious about the opportunity, but disciplined about implementation. Part of that discipline is recognising that AI is evolving faster than many organisations’ assumptions about how work gets done. Before applying AI to an existing process, leaders should ask: if we were designing this experience today, with the capabilities we now have, would we solve it in the same way?
Take customer service as an example. For decades, organisations have helped customers find answers through call centres, knowledge bases and scripted responses. AI creates an opportunity to rethink that experience entirely, moving from helping customers find information, to providing more contextual, personalised support - letting scripts become rich, conversational exchanges. The same question applies to advice: are we simply using AI to make existing processes faster, or are we rethinking how advice can be created and delivered in a way that better supports clients and advisers?
Leading in wealthtech is not about creating isolated islands of AI automation, it’s about building a holistic, trusted platform, with connections to the whole planner ecosystem.
What we can learn from other industries
Looking outside advice, there are useful examples of organisations approaching AI successfully.
A digital platform in the property sector is a good example. Its advantage was never simply the technology, but the trust built with customers through an established digital platform and its deep understanding of the property journey. Its early AI capability created value because it improved an existing customer experience, rather than attempting to create an entirely new channel or customer relationship on Day 1. There is a strong parallel for advice - the opportunity is not to replace the adviser relationship, but to strengthen it through interactive learning about the needs of the customer.
A leading global online travel company provides another useful example of the experimental mindset and evolving AI from knowledge gained. The company recognised that customers do not experience group travel as a series of discrete transactions, but as journeys. Its initial AI approach focused on connecting moments of truth and creating a more seamless, responsive experience, monitoring how customers reacted to the AI interaction, then innovating from there.
Advice is similar. Clients do not experience advice as a series of isolated process steps. They experience life moments: buying a home, building wealth, preparing for retirement or navigating uncertainty. AI has the potential to help advisers better support those journeys.
Building trusted AI into advice
The lessons from organisations already navigating AI transformation are consistent: start with a clear purpose, understand the problem you are trying to solve and build the foundations needed to use AI responsibly.
For advice firms, the lessons are practical. Start with trust - using AI to strengthen the relationships and experiences clients already value. Strengthen the foundations underneath the technology, including data quality, processes and governance. Focus on improving the end-to-end client journey rather than automating isolated tasks. And begin with real problems, using experimentation and feedback to learn what creates genuine value.
Ensuring data is accurate, well governed, and connected will be critical to generating reliable insights and building confidence in AI-supported advice. The quality of AI outputs depends heavily on the quality of the data, context, and information it can access. Poor data foundations will limit even the most advanced AI capabilities, creating inaccurate outputs, reducing confidence and potentially increasing risk.
Trust is built through consistency, fairness, observability and transparency, and those qualities come from the governance, processes, human oversight, and decisions that sit around AI technology. We are still early in the AI journey. This is not a mature technology that can simply be rolled out and optimised. The organisations that create lasting value will be those that take the time to understand where AI genuinely creates value, identify the risks, and build the capability to use it responsibly.
Technology may evolve, but trust remains the foundation
AI will change the way advice is created and delivered, but the defining advantage of the profession will remain the human expertise, judgement and relationships that clients trust. The firms that lead the next era of advice will be those that use AI thoughtfully - creating more capacity for advisers, improving and joining the dots on client experiences, while amplifying the judgement and trust that define great advice.
For a deeper look at how AI can create value while strengthening trust in financial advice, read the full report from Iress and Thoughtworks: ‘Building trust in an AI world’.
Sam Wall, Iress CEO – Wealth APAC
Manu Iyer, Thoughtworks Director & Industry Head
Nigel Dalton, Thoughtworks Social Scientist
* Investment Trends 2026 Adviser Technology Needs Report, Australia
** Responsible AI Australia
*** 2025 Governance Institute of Australia Ethics Index
