Originally appeared in
Wherefore art thou, artificial intelligence adviser
Published in The Sunday Times on March 15 2026.
I’ve written previously about change in the financial advice industry, but seldom has there been a week as there was recently, where the industry looked down the barrel of huge change which threatened its very existence.
Altruist Corp in the US recently developed an AI tool which can make financial planning recommendations, provide investment advice and implement tax strategies at the push of a button. Market reaction on 10th February was swift with shares in a number of US and European wealth managers falling by up to 12%.
In the week that followed my LinkedIn feed was flooded with advisers posting about AI and many service providers to the industry who were keen to cash in on the fear factor; if a machine can do the technical work, what is it that the great financial adviser of the future offers?
The answer, increasingly, is the ability to have a deeper conversation. There is a growing recognition that the great advisers of the future will be those who adopt a coaching mentality, who are less instructive and more inquisitive. Because the best decision isn’t always the one that is the most technically correct, it’s the one that the client understands, believes in and the one they will follow through on. Coincidentally, two days after the Altruist bombshell, I was scheduled to give a talk to a group of advisers, on coaching skills for Financial Planners.
I learned the lesson about why great questions matter several years ago when a client approached me to mature his pension. He had reached his retirement age, and as far as he was concerned, that meant it was time to draw his pension. I processed the request. It was, after all, what he had asked me to do.
But here is what a deeper conversation would have revealed. He didn’t actually need the money. He had no immediate financial pressure, no need he was trying to satisfy. He had simply assumed, quite reasonably, that reaching retirement age and receiving his retirement options letter, meant that he had to take his pension. He didn’t know that he could, if he wished, have left his pension invested and avoided the imputed distribution rule, which effectively forces you to withdraw a minimum of 4% each year, for several more years. I am quite sure that similar scenarios play out hundreds of times each day in advice firms across the country. In fact, the juxtaposition between truly client-centred advice and marketing campaigns which encourage pension savers to access their pension at age 50 is striking.
Transactional advice, on its very best day, answers the question you ask. It’s solution oriented, hopefully innovative, but ultimately much like AI, blinkered, and blind to anything other than a straight line from A to B, with B being the accumulation of a stated amount which it has been determined will fund the objective you specify.
Coaching led advice asks the question behind the question. It teases out the why and wherefore, gets to the root of the issue to fully understand. When that client asked me to mature his pension, I had the “what”. What I didn’t have was the “why” and the “wherefore”, the reason for his request, what assumptions he was making, his needs at that time.
AI cannot replicate that. It can’t listen to you express the emotions which guide you, the reasons you want a particular outcome. It can’t ask the great questions that reveal the possibilities not thought of, the incorrect assumptions made, that may lead you to a better answer.
The traditional model of financial advice was based on the sale of financial products. Financial planning switches the focus from products to planning. Coaching led advice puts the wellbeing of the client at the very heart of the matter.
If you’re choosing a financial adviser, or if you’re currently working with one and wondering if you are getting the most from them, ask yourself the question, does this person just do what I tell them to do, or do they ask the great questions which help uncover the right solution for me, which they or I, might never have thought of?
As fans of Romeo and Juliet might recall, when Juliet asks the oft quoted and misunderstood question “wherefore art thou Romeo”, she wasn’t asking Romeo where he was, she was asking him why he was (a Montague). The ability to ask great questions is all you need.
Eoghan Gavigan is a certified financial planner and the owner of Highfield Financial Planning hfp.ie
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