Will AI Replace the Lowly Human Financial Planner?
By John Henry Robinson, Lowly Human Financial Planner (May 2025)
Each time a new technology platform emerges to disrupt the investment industry, the forecasts of impending doom for the financial advice business sprout like weeds after a heavy rain. In the 1980s, the existential threat was allegedly posed by the emergence of “discount brokers,” such as Charles Schwab and Quick & Reilly. The 1990s saw the rise (and fall with the dot.com bubble) of online trading shops such as e*Trade, Scott Trade, and Ameritrade. The 2010s ushered in the so-called “Robo Advisors,” led by Betterment and Wealthfront, most of which have failed to scale to profitability. While each of these innovations did reshape the investment landscape, ironically, the net effects were to validate consumer demand for personal advice from a knowledgeable human advisor and facilitate the migration of financial advisors away from old-school transactional brokerage business to the now dominant fee-for advice models.
In the 2020’s, the existential threat du jour is, of course, Artificial Intelligence. It does not tax the computing power of Chat GPT to produce a slew of articles predicting an apocalypse for financial planners like me. Here is a sampling:
31% of Investors are OK with Using AI as Their Financial Advisor (CNBC)
Artificial Intelligence Will Replace Your Financial Advisor (Forbes)
Could AI ever replace human wealth management Advisors? (World Economic Forum)
One particularly visionary article that articulates the threat as lucidly has any I have seen is David Macchia’s 2023 Advisor Perspectives essay, Why AI Poses a Mortal Threat to Financial Advisors. In it, the author paints the financial planner of the very near future to be a human-like avatar that will interact with consumers in a manner that is indistinguishable from a human advisor on a video conference call. The avatar will be replete with human expressions and emotions such as empathy, but with a much, much greater body of knowledge than its organic mammalian counterpart.
To be clear, the “digital humans” that Macchia envisions have essentially arrived in 2025. From my vantage point, digital financial planners seem to be approaching a stage akin to driverless cars. For anyone who has hailed a ride from Waymo in Los Angeles or San Francisco, it is clear that driverless cabs represent an existential threat to Uber and Lyft, and it does not take a huge leap of imagination to see driverless cars in consumer garages as less than a generation away.
It's Waymo’s World. We’re All Just Riding in It. (Wall Street Journal)
It also does not take a great leap of imagination to see how using a digital human for a financial planner might evoke a similar thrill and sense of novelty.
How and Why Human Financial Planners Will Again Prevail.
In 2017, at the peak of the Robo-Advisor tech-bro founders’ chest-thumping glory, I wrote a satirical essay for Advisor Perspectives titled “You might be a Robo-Advisor If…” In the piece I accurately predicted that the Robo-Advisor model not only represented no threat to the financial advice community, but that the notion of personal advice in the form of generic automated portfolios would ultimately be rejected by consumers and would lead to a greater appreciation for one-on-one planning with a knowledgeable human advisor. Here is an excerpt from the article’s conclusion –
“Those of us in the financial advice profession should thank the robo-advisors for proving our worth and for setting a clearly defined minimum value standard for advice against which to compare and compete. We should also thank them for setting the bar so low.”
Of course, every war is different, and it would be naïve and foolhardy not to recognize that the prospect of going head-to-head against a digital human financial planner represents a logarithmic step up in the level of competition. Nonetheless, I am firm in my belief that at least the best among us human financial planners will still prevail. However, unlike the Robo-Advisor battle in which we prevailed because of our competitors’ shortcomings, in the battle against AI advice, I believe the human planners will prevail by adopting and leveraging the same technologies that powers the digital human avatar planners.
Simply put, if we can level the playing field by harnessing the power of AI for consumers, a path to victory lies merely in being more human than the digital humans – and on that front we will always have the sun at our backs and the higher ground from which to defend our position.
How AI is Enhancing Advice and Productivity at Financial Planning Hawaii and Fee-Only Planning Hawaii.
In reflecting on my 37 years in this industry, I noticed a pattern in how I approach technological innovation. At first, I tend to be openly skeptical, which means I am rarely an early adopter. At the same time, I have always recognized that the financial planning and wealth management space is in a perpetual state of disruption, and that, to survive and prosper requires an “adapt or perish” mindset. I remain open-minded, and completely willing to incorporate new ideas into my practice once the value proposition becomes clear.
My position on AI has followed my behavioral pattern to a T. Over the past couple of years, I have written articles about how generative AI is not ready for Primetime in the advisor space, and how it seems overhyped in general. True to form, in the past few months – specifically the time since my last newsletter – my views on the value of incorporating AI into my financial planning practice have taken a 180-degree turn. In the past three months, I have begun using three different AI platforms that collectively represent an incredible leap forward in efficiency, productivity, and competitiveness.
Last August (2024), I published an article titled, “Move over Chat GPT. There’s a new AI Sheriff in Town and its Name is Perplexity.” The adoption of Perplexity AI for content creation and as a tool to validate planning guidance has become a game-changer for me. In that piece, I noted that a huge problem with AI-generated advice content is that there is so much awful financial planning advice on the Internet that AI’s tendency to rely on crowdsourcing often leads to flawed AI-generated advice. When I use AI to help me write an article, I have a huge advantage insofar as I have the knowledge and experience to recognize when the AI-generated advice generated is flawed or dated. Perplexity also makes my job easier because it cites every source it uses to support my thesis. This allows me to weed out low domain authority sources. Articles that previously took me 5-10 hours to craft now can be generated in a minute or less. Even with the 10-15 minutes it takes to review the content for accuracy and inject my personality into the prose, the time saving and productivity enhancements are mind-blowing.
As I explained in my recent post, “If Costco and Hermes had a Baby,” a structural advantage of our business model is that I write our financial planning reviews by hand instead of giving clients the same generic, book-length, boiler-plate “financial plans” that many of our competitors provide. While such extreme personalization sets us apart, the labor-intensive nature of the work also limits our ability to scale. Each 15-25 page review takes 20 hours or more for me to produce. This work is largely unavoidable for the Findings and Recommendations section of my reports, but advancements in AI notetaking software such as Jump AI for Advisors has hacked hours off the time it takes to produce the Information Gathering Summary.
While the two aforementioned examples should give readers a sense of how traditional financial planners’ adoption of AI tools may enable us to at least put up a credible fight against our digital counterparts, I have one more “secret weapon” that I hope will enable to me to take the fight directly to the enemy. That weapon is to become an avatar myself. The technology that enables this was recently introduced to me by financial advice industry thought leader, Dan Solin. In a nutshell, the software takes a short video recording of me speaking and creates an extraordinarily realistic avatar that can then be used to create a limitless catologue of 1-2 minute video clips with the same ease that I am able to create written content… and with four decades of experience and expertise on a broad range of financial planning topics, I have alot of content to create! I am willing to wager that with a little bit of humor and a healthy dose of charisma I will be able to make my financial planning services more attractive and engaging to human consumers than my Avatar competitors.
Conclusion – The Human Advantage
Far from being a requiem for the financial advice business, the central theme of this commentary has been to suggest that the threat posed by the rapid evolution of AI and the pending introduction of digital human financial planner avatars, may be countered by financial planners who adopt and leverage AI for themselves.
However, I also recognize that leveling the playing field is not the same as gaining an advantage. As I mentioned, AI’s inability to spot and weed-out bad information remains an Achilles heel and a potential vulnerability that human planners may be able to exploit. Evidence to support this may be found in the legal community, as news headlines abound about attorneys being reprimanded for citing false case law in Chat GPT-enhanced briefs.
AI 'hallucinations' in court papers spell trouble for lawyers
Lawyer cites fake cases generated by ChatGPT in legal brief
B.C. lawyer reprimanded for citing fake cases invented by Chat GPT
New York lawyers sanctioned for using fake ChatGPT Cases in Legal Brief
With respect to my own practice, I am absolutely thrilled at the ways in which the adoption of AI tools is dramatically improving my business model. It is definitely elevating my game, and making me a better financial planner. I obviously recognize the competitive threat that AI poses, but I believe that last 10% or so gap between the digital human avatars and the real human avatars will be an exteremely difficult void for AI to cross. For instance, I doubt very much if my digital planning avatar competitors will be able to replicate either my iconic fashion sense or my sardonic rapier wit. At the same time, I am reminded of the eerie similarity between my confidence in competing against an omnipotent machine learning application today and the late 1800s folktale of the eponymous John Henry and his ill-fated rail-driving battle against a steam engine.
John Henry Robinson is the owner/founder of Financial Planning Hawaii and Fee-Only Planning Hawaii. He is also a co-founder of fintech software maker Nest Egg Guru and the new personal finance website NestEggPF.com.
