Headlines from Reuters might tempt many advice-related AI startup projects to go on ice.
The warning: regulated financial advice must stay in the hands of authorised businesses, and AI tools should be kept to ‘generic guidance’.
But here’s the thing. This isn’t a red light for AI in your practice. It’s a red light for the ‘Black Box’ approach, where you feed a client’s life savings into a prompt and hope the machine spits out a compliant strategy.
That’s not just risky – which most of us know already; it’s a fundamental misunderstanding of what this technology is actually for.
Treating AI as a replacement for professional judgement is a recipe for trouble,
Using it to draft the file note of a conversation you already had, or to summarise a 60-page research report, that’s efficient.
Sure, there are some people who want the magic button that does the hard thinking, so this is actually giving us a very helpful boundary: keep the advice human, and make the guidance generic.
In practice, that means using AI to handle the ‘heavy lifting’ of data and documentation while you—the professional—remain the only one making the calls.
Proper Use Case
When I work with firms on their operating models, we don’t just ‘add AI’. We look at the role design.
We ask: where does the professional judgement sit, and where does the administrative friction sit? If you haven’t mapped that out, you’re basically running an experiment with your licence.
If you’re worried about crossing that line, the best move isn’t to stop using the tools. It’s to fix your workflow so the ‘generic’ safety margin is built into the process.
You want an engine that helps you execute the same way every week, not a rogue chatbot pretending it’s a Senior Adviser.
If you want to pressure-test how you’re currently using technology and see where the actual capacity gaps are, let’s have a look at it.
Book a Practice Growth Session
Or, if you want to see the numbers first:
