Is AI replacing financial advisers? Why 94% of clients say no
Written by Holly Mackay, CEO and Founder
29 Sep, 2026
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A third of people with a financial adviser have already turned to AI for help with money, and two-thirds of savers say they are comfortable letting it support their decisions. But don't expect people to sack the human any time soon. Our research, combined with new data from Quilter, digs into who is using AI, what they are asking it to do, and why 94% of advised clients say they are sticking with their adviser regardless.
How many people are already using AI for financial help?
Here's a stat that might surprise you: 33% of people with a financial adviser have already turned to AI for help with money. [1]
A keener 9% of advised clients now use an AI tool or assistant regularly - for things like understanding an investment, researching a product, or thinking through a decision - and a further 24% dip in occasionally for the same kind of support. [2]
The appetite is broader still. Quilter's research found that 67% of savers and investors say they would be comfortable using AI to support financial decision-making. [3] And the trust is real, particularly among the young. The Financial Conduct Authority's latest research found that 56% of young investors trust AI tools when considering investments. That is more than currently trust TV and radio (47%), the press (46%), or social media influencers (29%). [4]
Who’s using AI alongside a financial adviser?
No surprises here - it's the younger crowd. 86% of under-40s with an adviser have used AI for financial support, compared to just 8% of over-65s. [5]
Sometimes people genuinely do know what they want, an ISA before the tax year ends, or a payout that would clear the mortgage. For that, going online is faster and cheaper, and a generation raised on app-based banking and tracking naturally reaches for that interface first.
Quilter's data tells the same story from a different angle: 87% of high earners who are not rich yet are comfortable using AI to support financial decisions, versus 41% of those who are retired. Younger savers and investors, aged 45 and under, are also more comfortable using AI for recommendations than older groups. [6]
But age isn't the only factor. Confidence matters too. Boring Money’s research found over 6 in 10 people who say they feel “very confident” about investing have used AI, compared to just 10% of the least confident. [7]
So rather than levelling the playing field, AI right now looks like a tool for the already-confident, not necessarily a leg-up for those who need more support.
Why are more people turning to AI for financial help?
Part of the answer is simply that it is there, and it is easy. It is free, it is instant, and it does not make you fill in a long form about your life before it says anything useful.
AI is particularly attractive because, at the moment, it is free, completely instant and doesn't require you to answer lots of personal questions. We live in an increasingly instant consumer world. People want things quickly, and AI delivers that. It makes financial information accessible, immediate and easy to understand, often reducing something complicated into a simple answer.
But there is something deeper than convenience going on.
The same thing that pushes people towards advisers is the thing that pushes them towards LLMs to discuss their finances. There is a real need; people want help, especially when they reflect on important moments in their financial lives.
What is AI useful for?
Mostly, it is the factual groundwork: understanding an investment, comparing products, or prepping questions before a call with a real person.
Quilter's data backs this up, with 42% of people comfortable using AI to explain financial concepts. And when we asked our panel what they would happily let AI do, about two-thirds said they were using it to complement their adviser rather than replace them. It is a hybrid approach. AI does the digging and the fact-finding, then a human checks it and signs off. [8]
AI is not accurate enough for me to make big financial decisions... but I think it would be helpful for modelling and guidance ahead of a call with a person, and it would make that call more productive.
It makes perfect sense for people to use a language model to help them make financial decisions, just as it is sensible to use one to help organise building works. Used correctly, they let buyers with a knowledge disadvantage make better decisions and make the market more efficient.
Can AI provide personalised financial advice?
Although AI is very good at information, it is much less good at advice, because good advice is personal.
There's a real difference between financial advice and financial planning. Advice is intermediating a transaction, matching a product to a stated need. Planning is a relationship-led service that helps people understand their psychology around money, not just their portfolio. AI already does the first job well: for simple products and informed buyers, a dashboard of ticks and crosses works. But most financial decisions aren't simple, and most buyers don't fully know what they want. AI can only work with what you know how to ask for.
Good financial advice is personal. Without understanding someone's full circumstances, objectives, attitude to risk, capacity for loss, family situation and wider financial position, it is very difficult to provide genuinely suitable advice. The lack of personal information is often why an AI response can be technically plausible but completely wrong for that individual.
A technically correct answer built on the wrong assumptions about your life is not much use. Sometimes it is worse than no use at all and can be damaging.
According to Quilter’s research, 68.7% of women say they are comfortable using AI to help with financial decisions, compared with 66.7% of men. Women are also more likely than men to use AI to explain financial concepts, which may point to a gap in how confident men and women feel about financial terminology. [9]
Samantha Secomb, founder of Women's Wealth, a financial planning organisation specifically for women, believes AI can help women prepare questions to raise in meetings with their adviser. In her view, AI should be seen as a way into financial advice rather than a threat to it.
It reminds me of being criticised by my old GP for googling symptoms, then having his successor teach me how to google properly so I'd get useful results. That was fifteen years ago, and AI is just the next stage of that journey. We're confident in our recommendations, so we don't fear challenge. If anything, a member who's prepared with AI-assisted questions leaves better informed. What we do warn members about is data: suitability letters contain our intellectual property and their personal financial details, so we tell them not to feed that into free AI tools that may train on it. If they want to use AI on their own documents, use a paid service that doesn't retain inputs.
However, women should be more cautious about the advice AI generates as it might not take into account their gender and is therefore not personalised to their life and situation.
My real concern with AI in financial advice is that it amplifies gender bias rather than removing it. Ask a generic question like how much pension you need for £45k a year from 60, and the data behind it skews male, so the answer isn't calibrated to a woman's life expectancy or career pattern. Unless you specifically ask for gender-specific results, you get a male default presented as neutral. There's also a psychological pull: women often feel embarrassed asking "stupid" questions out loud, a shame they haven't earned because no one teaches us this stuff. Asking a machine in private feels safer than admitting it to a person. That's understandable, but it also means women are quietly self-selecting into a system that's already working against them by default.
Should investors trust AI for big financial decisions?
People are far less keen on letting AI make the big calls. Only 24% of savers are comfortable using it to recommend investments, and just 22% are comfortable using it to help make decisions, according to Quilter. [10] Only around half of those who use it would trust it with a full financial plan or retirement modelling.
Advisers would echo this sentiment.
I have often seen AI produce responses that are simply wrong, and when it comes to financial advice that can have serious consequences. It could mean someone making the wrong decision, incurring an unexpected and potentially significant tax bill, or investing in something completely inappropriate for their circumstances. I once saw an AI bot use the tax rates from 2008/09 rather than the present day, for no apparent reason.
Then there is the question nobody thinks about until it goes wrong: accountability.
There is an important point around protection. If AI gives you incorrect financial guidance, who do you complain to? There is no adviser responsible for that guidance, and ultimately the individual is taking the risk themselves.
Why do investors still make mistakes?
Even with more information available than ever before, plenty of investors still trip over the same behavioural hurdles.
My biggest practical learning from using LLMs extensively over the last two years is that they can be incredibly helpful if you already know the subject. If your critical faculties aren't well calibrated for the topic at hand, you can become more confidently wrong. I have seen this anecdotally, and there is some evidence to suggest it happens more widely.
Are people ditching financial advisers for AI?
So, how are consumer behaviours shifting when it comes to getting help and financial advice? We're not (yet?) seeing signs of appetite for professional human-led advice dwindling. A significant 94% of advised clients plan to stick with theirs, although we are seeing changes in expectations. [11]
AI can be a brilliant tool for improving financial knowledge and helping people understand their options, but information isn't the same as personal advice. I don't think AI will replace financial advisers. We've already seen examples of clients coming to us with incorrect information or potentially damaging ideas they've found on ChatGPT or similar. Financial decisions are often emotional as well as practical, and AI doesn't know your family circumstances and goals or the worries that keep you awake at night.
People are finding more online sources of help, whether that's AI or a DIY investment platform, and then asking their adviser to do less of the legwork and more of the judging: sense-checking the numbers, reviewing the plan, and being the trusted voice who signs off on the decisions that really matter.
It seems that for now, in the battle of bots versus brokers, humans still have the edge when it comes to validation and trust.
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[1] Boring Money Advised Investors Report 2026
[2] Boring Money Advised Investors Report 2026
[3] Quilter Value of Advice Report 2026
[4] FCA
[5] Quilter Value of Advice Report 2026
[6] Boring Money Advised Investors Report 2026
[7] Boring Money Advised Investors Report 2026
[8] Quilter Value of Advice Report 2026
[9] Quilter Value of Advice Report 2026
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