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AI Adoption in Advice Firms

Journalist: Hereward Mills, FT Adviser

ended 13. May 2026

Recent research from the lang cat has shown 62 per cent are comfortable with agentic AI technology being embedded in the platforms they use.

However, AI use is far from uniform - especially with so many new products on the market. 

Advisers,

  • Has your firm adopted AI tools? Do you use firm-approved AI, personal tools such as ChatGPT or Claude, or a combination of both?
  • Are you satisfied with the pace of AI adoption at your firm? Should firms move faster to seize a competitive advantage, or is a focus on AI diverting time and resources from other priorities. 

Very keen to hear your thoughts on this one. 

Best, 

Hereward 

4 responses from the Newspage community

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Daren Wallbank
Co-founder and Chartered Financial Planner at Ginkgo Financial
You can have pace without pain - but only if AI gets woven into your everyday work rather than sitting alongside it as a separate project.
We were keen to see what AI could do for client service and for our business early on. For a while, it was a shiny thing that took up a lot of our time as founders, while some of the team were unsure how to use it or whether to trust it. So we appointed an AI Champion to sit with people individually - working through their day-to-day, spotting where things could run more smoothly, helping them get more out of our tools, building their confidence and proficiency. And we were always clear that the AI was there to helps us do more of the things humans do better - not to replace them.
Building our own tools helped. AI didn’t replace existing processes. It made them easier and better, so people were keen to adopt. You don't need to be especially technical to build your own AI tools: small firms like ours can build exactly what they need.
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Nouran Moustafa
Practice Principal & IFA at Roxton Wealth
AI is already part of how modern advice firms work, whether firms admit it publicly or not. At Roxton Wealth, I see AI as a support tool, not a replacement for advice. It can help with structure, research, drafting, admin thinking and speeding up internal workflows, but the judgement, responsibility and client relationship must always sit with the adviser.

The real risk is not AI itself. The risk is advisers using personal tools with no framework, no data discipline and no clear compliance oversight. Firms need to stop treating AI as either a magic solution or a forbidden toy, and start building sensible controls around how it is used.

I do think firms that move too slowly will lose ground, because clients expect speed, clarity and a better experience. But adoption should not mean chasing every shiny new tool. The advantage will belong to firms that use AI intelligently: reducing admin, improving consistency and freeing advisers to spend more time doing the human part of advice.
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Paul Denley
CEO at Oakham Wealth Management
As a boutique serving HNW & UHNW clients, we have the luxury of not operating a volume business. For us, AI is not about replacing people, but removing friction - automating administrative tasks so we can focus more time on what clients value: judgement, investment management and relationships.

We use both internal and external tools, selecting models based on which is best suited to the task rather than allegiance to any one provider. Client confidentiality remains paramount, and sensitive client data is not shared with AI platforms.

But is simply “using AI” really a competitive advantage? With access rapidly democratising, any edge is likely to be fleeting.

A bigger question is whether firms should be racing to build proprietary AI using their own client data. That may prove less a source of lasting advantage than an expensive, wasteful arms race of duplicated effort.

Ultimately, the differentiator will be how intelligently firms apply AI to improve client outcomes and service.
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Faisal Sheikh
Managing Director at Monmouth Capital
“If I were an autonomous AI agent hooked up to your email or financial software, and you gave me an "uber prompt" based on that fabrication, the consequences would have moved from a conversational annoyance to a systemic failure.”

That's an actual quote from Google's Gemini after I had called it out on multiple "hallucinations" (or "lies" in human parlance) which perfectly sums up why I'm being extremely careful about the adoption of AI. For purely administrative, low stakes tasks, it's excellent. For work that requires sensitivity, accuracy and completeness, which characterises much of what we do as financial advisors, it's unreliable and could even be dangerous.

The headlong rush to "adopt AI", whatever that means, is almost certainly driven by the carrot of cost savings, plus a smattering of needing to keep up with the times.