More than three million Australians are already using artificial intelligence to help manage their money. That sounds like the beginning of a familiar disruption story: another profession facing an algorithm that can answer questions faster, cheaper and at any hour of the day.
Except the same Australians drawing on AI for financial help remain deeply wary of handing it the decisions that matter. New research from TAL and McCrindle found that while AI use is growing quickly, particularly among younger Australians, most people still place considerably more trust in human expertise for major financial decisions. In the accompanying research, only 22 per cent said they were comfortable using AI to help make major financial decisions and just 20 per cent trusted it to recommend a financial product suited to their needs.
That tension is significant because it reveals something more interesting than a simple contest between humans and machines. AI is not arriving in financial advice merely as a substitute for an adviser. It is beginning to separate the parts of advice that depend on access to information from the parts that depend on judgement.
For much of the profession’s history, those two things were bundled together. Advisers knew things clients did not, had access to tools clients did not have, and could interpret a financial system most people found intimidating. Increasingly, that information advantage is disappearing. Answers are becoming abundant. The harder question is what happens to the value of advice when they do.
Australia’s advice gap is widening
AI is entering the market at an unusually consequential moment for Australian financial advice. Deloitte’s Advice 2030 report notes that the number of advisers fell 43 per cent over the five years leading up to 2024. At the same time, the advisers who remain are generally serving more clients with more complex needs.
The economics have shifted accordingly. Adviser Ratings reported that the median ongoing advice fee reached $4,668 in 2025, up 18 per cent in a single year and 67 per cent across five years. The explanation is not simply that advisers are charging more for the same service. Compliance costs have risen, the profession has contracted, and many practices have moved towards clients with larger portfolios and more complicated financial affairs.
The result is an awkward mismatch. Australia has an increasingly sophisticated superannuation system, an ageing population, more self-directed investors and growing complexity around retirement, tax, insurance, estate planning and intergenerational wealth. Yet personalised professional advice has become harder for many households to justify financially.
Deloitte and Iress estimate that 59 per cent of Australians have low financial capability, while 57 per cent of Australians over 55 have never undertaken retirement planning. Those figures are especially striking when set beside the rising cost of advice. The people who could benefit from guidance are not necessarily the people the traditional advice model can economically serve.
That is the gap into which AI is moving.
AI may change the economics before it changes the adviser
There is a temptation to imagine disruption in its most dramatic form: the client stops calling the adviser because an AI system can build the plan instead. That may happen at the edges, but the immediate transformation appears more mundane and, for the industry, potentially more significant.
Australian advisers themselves are adopting AI quickly. Research from the Financial Planning Standards Board and the Financial Advice Association Australia found that 82 per cent of Australian advice businesses were using, piloting or planning to use AI within the following 12 months, compared with 64 per cent globally. Sixty-four per cent of Australian advisers surveyed believed AI would reduce the cost of providing advice.
The early applications are not especially glamorous. AI is being used to draft client communications, collect information, document meetings, manage workflows, prepare reporting and reduce administrative load. These are precisely the activities that make personalised advice expensive without necessarily being the reason a client values the relationship.
This creates a possibility that is easy to miss. AI could threaten parts of the financial advice business model while simultaneously making financial advice more viable. If technology strips hours from fact-finding, documentation, compliance and follow-up, one adviser may eventually be able to serve more people without simply working longer hours.
That doesn’t automatically mean lower fees, nor does it guarantee that underserved Australians will suddenly gain access to high-quality advice. Technology savings have a habit of being absorbed before they are passed on. But it changes the underlying economics. For the first time in years, the industry has a plausible tool for reducing the cost of the machinery surrounding advice.
More information is not producing more confidence
The more important change may be happening on the client side of the desk.
TAL and McCrindle’s 2026 research found that Australians are remarkably engaged with their finances. Eighty-six per cent regularly monitor their spending and 80 per cent prioritise budgeting. Yet only 28 per cent are satisfied with their finances, 62 per cent feel stressed when they think about money and almost a third do not feel in control of their financial future. It is hard to look at those figures and conclude that the problem is simply a shortage of information. In fact, there’s a danger that more information simply gives people more to worry about. When money feels uncertain, our attention naturally gravitates towards what could go wrong: the gaps, risks, shortfalls and all the things we haven’t quite sorted out yet.
We already live in an age of financial calculators, comparison sites, podcasts, online brokers, superannuation dashboards, finfluencers and endless explanatory content. AI adds an extraordinarily capable new layer to that ecosystem. But perhaps what people need isn’t simply more information. They need greater clarity about what matters, what they can control and what’s actually possible.
Or course, knowing what a sensible decision looks like and being able to make it are different things. A retiree can understand the mathematics of drawdown and still be frightened of spending. An investor can understand diversification and still panic when markets fall. A couple can know that their financial goals are inconsistent and still struggle to decide which one should give way. A business owner can understand that selling the company would create financial security while remaining emotionally unable to let go of the thing that has defined them for 30 years.
Financial decisions are rarely optimisation problems alone. They are tangled up with identity, fear, family, status, regret, uncertainty and the stories people tell themselves about what money means.
This is where advice has an opportunity to meet people where they actually are, not just financially but emotionally. Good advice doesn’t eliminate uncertainty or pretend that every risk can be controlled. It helps turn noise into perspective, giving people enough clarity and confidence to make decisions in a world where certainty was never really available in the first place.
AI can make financial knowledge dramatically more accessible. What it cannot yet guarantee is that someone will use that knowledge wisely in the circumstances of their own life.
The value of advice has always been broader than returns
This distinction is supported by a growing body of research on what financial advice actually contributes.
A 2023 systematic review led by Griffith University’s Kirsten MacDonald examined 286 academic studies and high-quality reports on the value of professional financial advice. Eighty per cent of the literature had focused on tangible financial outcomes, yet the authors concluded that the evidence base remained too narrow. Benefits such as financial wellbeing, peace of mind, confidence and the quality of the adviser-client relationship are harder to measure, but that does not make them irrelevant.
More recent Australian research has begun to put firmer evidence around some of the financial outcomes. In 2026, MacDonald and colleagues analysed 55,577 retirement portfolio rebalances within a large Australian defined-contribution fund. Advised rebalances were positively associated with several portfolio outcomes, and the researchers found no evidence that advisers directed clients into higher-fee funds. Importantly, the study does not prove that advice caused those better outcomes. People who seek advice differ from those who do not. But it does make the simplistic claim that human advice adds no measurable financial value increasingly difficult to sustain.
Research into trust adds another layer. A 2024 study of 1,297 Australian adults by Steffen Westermann, Jennifer Harrison and Scott Niblock found that willingness to seek financial advice was driven most strongly by what the researchers call narrow-scope trust: trust in the specific adviser relationship, rather than simply confidence in the financial system as a whole.
That finding looks especially important in an AI-rich world. If competent financial explanations become easy to generate, the scarce resource may no longer be intelligence in the abstract. It may be confidence that the person or system helping you understands your circumstances, has your interests in mind and will still be there when the consequences of a decision become real.
Retirement shows why this matters
Retirement is perhaps the clearest example of the difference between information and judgement.
Australia has spent decades building one of the world’s largest compulsory retirement savings systems. For many households, the accumulation side has worked extraordinarily well. Yet Grattan Institute research published in 2025 found that about 80 per cent of Australians consider retirement planning complicated and roughly 60 per cent expect retirement to be financially stressful.
The surprising part is what happens next. Many retirees do not draw down their savings as intended. Some continue to be net savers for years after they stop working, allowing their super balances to keep growing. Grattan argues that this is turning part of the superannuation system into an inheritance vehicle rather than a mechanism for funding a better retirement.
There is something revealing in that behaviour. These Australians have, in one sense, succeeded. They accumulated assets. Their challenge is no longer primarily knowing that they should save. It is having enough confidence in an uncertain future to spend what they saved.
No calculator can remove longevity risk. No AI model can promise what markets will do over the next 20 years or tell someone exactly how long they will live. The value of advice in that setting is partly technical, but it is also interpretive: helping a person understand the range of reasonable outcomes, decide what level of uncertainty they can live with and act without demanding a certainty that the world cannot provide.
From information advantage to judgement advantage
This is why I suspect the most useful way to think about the next era of financial advice is as a shift from information advantage to judgement advantage. The old information advantage was straightforward. Professionals possessed knowledge, data and analytical tools that clients either could not access or could not easily interpret. That scarcity justified part of the premium attached to expertise.
AI weakens that scarcity. A capable client can now arrive at a meeting having spent hours interrogating an AI system about salary sacrifice, portfolio construction, retirement income, insurance structures or the tax implications of different choices. In many cases, they may be better prepared than the client who walked into an adviser’s office a decade ago. They may also arrive confidently wrong.
Large language models can present stale information, misunderstand Australian rules, overlook relevant circumstances and produce errors in a tone that makes uncertainty difficult to detect. As the attached Sydney Morning Herald analysis put it, the danger is not merely that AI can be wrong, but that it can look well-reasoned and comprehensive while being wrong. For complex financial decisions, that difference matters.
The adviser’s comparative advantage therefore starts to move. It becomes less about being the only person in the room who knows the answer and more about knowing which answer applies, which assumptions need challenging, which risks matter and when a technically optimal option is unlikely to survive contact with human behaviour.
Judgement also includes something algorithms do not bear in the same way: accountability. A licensed adviser operates within professional and regulatory obligations. They can be questioned about a recommendation, expected to justify it and held responsible for the process used to reach it. AI systems may become dramatically more capable, but capability and accountability are not the same thing.
The human advantage cannot be taken for granted
None of this is an argument for complacency within financial advice. The profession has its own uncomfortable history. Australia’s Royal Commission exposed serious conflicts, misconduct and product-driven advice, and academic research is careful not to pretend that the evidence for professional advice is uniformly strong.
Nor should advisers assume today’s limitations of AI will remain fixed. Models will gain better access to current data, longer memory, improved reasoning and more specialised financial capabilities. Regulatory frameworks will evolve. Digital systems will become more personalised. Tasks that feel distinctly human today may prove more automatable than we expect.
Clients are also unlikely to accept a simple proposition that human involvement justifies any price. Netwealth’s recent research suggests Australians often prefer human involvement when financial decisions become consequential, yet they are simultaneously becoming accustomed to digital convenience and instant access. The likely destination is not purely human advice or purely automated advice, but different combinations depending on complexity, stakes and cost.
That hybrid model could reshape the customer journey. People may use AI as their first financial sounding board, arrive at an adviser with much of the basic education already done, and then seek a human when the decision requires contextual judgement. Advice may become more episodic around moments such as retirement, inheritance, divorce, a business sale or a market shock, while routine questions and monitoring happen continuously through digital tools.
If that happens, advisers will need to become exceptionally good at the parts of their role that cannot be defended by information scarcity. Listening, questioning, interpreting, challenging assumptions, understanding behaviour and helping someone make a decision they can actually live with will move closer to the centre of the profession rather than sitting around its edges.
When the answers are everywhere
Financial advice may be an early example of a shift that will reach far beyond finance.
Lawyers, accountants, consultants, doctors and other knowledge professionals have historically been valuable partly because they had access to specialised information and knew how to interpret it. AI does not make that expertise irrelevant. It changes which part of the expertise remains scarce.
For financial advisers, the important question is therefore not whether AI can answer financial questions. Clearly it already can, and it will get better. The more useful question is which parts of advice are valuable precisely because a human being is exercising judgement in the presence of incomplete information, conflicting priorities and real consequences. That is a much higher bar for the profession. It is also a more interesting future.
When answers were scarce, possessing them was enough to create value. As answers become cheap and abundant, knowing what to trust, what matters and what to do next becomes the harder skill. Financial advice is not disappearing. It is being forced to reveal what it was really for.
Michael McQueen is a globally recognised trend forecaster, change strategist and keynote speaker.
A bestselling author of 10 books, Michael’s latest release was named by Malcolm Gladwell and Adam Grant as one of the top five must-read new leadership books. He is a sought-after media commentator, with his insights regularly featured in Forbes, The Guardian, and CNN.
To find out more about Michael and his work, click here.
NOTES
Adviser Ratings. “More Clients and More Money: Average Clients, Fees, and FUA All Up in 2025.” August 14, 2025. https://www.adviserratings.com.au/media/more-clients-and-more-money-average-clients-fees-and-fua-all-up-in-2025/
Coates, Brendan, Joey Moloney, and Esther Suckling. Simpler Super: Taking the Stress Out of Retirement. Grattan Institute, January 19, 2025. https://grattan.edu.au/report/simpler-super/
Deloitte Australia. Advice 2030: The Big Shift. August 9, 2024. https://www.deloitte.com/au/en/Industries/investment-management/perspectives/advice-2030-the-big-shift.html
Deloitte Access Economics. The Big Lift: The Economic Opportunity of Uplifting Financial Capability in Australia. Prepared for Iress, 2025. https://www.deloitte.com/au/en/services/economics/research/big-lift-economic-financial-capability-australia.html
Financial Advice Association Australia. “Australian Financial Advisers at the Forefront of AI Adoption.” May 8, 2025. https://faaa.au/australian-financial-advisers-at-the-forefront-of-ai-adoption/
Financial Planning Standards Board. Impact of AI on Financial Planning: Global Research 2025. 2025. https://fpsb.org/impact-of-ai-on-financial-planning-global-research/
MacDonald, Kirsten L., Emily Loy, Mark Brimble, and Kate Wildman. “The Value of Personal Professional Financial Advice to Clients: A Systematic Quantitative Literature Review.” Accounting & Finance 63, no. 4 (2023): 4399–4429. https://doi.org/10.1111/acfi.13099
MacDonald, Kirsten L., T. Hendry, K. L. Wildman, and M. Brimble. “The Value of Financial Advice and Portfolio Rebalancing for Retirement Savings.” Accounting & Finance (2026): 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1111/acfi.70237
Netwealth. “Advising the Connected Client: Human-Led, Digitally Savvy.” 2026. https://www.netwealth.com.au/web/insights/the-advisable-australian/advising-the-connected-client/
Pedersen-McKinnon, Nicole. “‘Computer Says No’: I Asked AI the Pitfalls of Asking AI for Money Advice.” Sydney Morning Herald, September 26, 2026. https://www.smh.com.au/money/planning-and-budgeting/computer-says-no-i-asked-ai-the-pitfalls-of-asking-ai-for-money-advice-20260926-p610k6.html
TAL. “Understanding Modern Australia Report Launched.” September 14, 2026. Research developed with McCrindle. https://www.grouphq.tal.com.au/industry-leadership-and-insights/news-and-articles/2026/09/understanding-modern-australia-index
Westermann, Steffen, Jennifer L. Harrison, and Scott J. Niblock. “Internal Factors Driving Willingness to Seek Financial Advice: The Role of Trust and Anxiety.” Journal of Consumer Affairs (2024): 1–40. https://doi.org/10.1111/joca.12611
