By Maria Lykouras, CEO of Stockbrokers and Investment Advisers Association (SIAA)
The financial services industry is grappling with the bigger questions posed by the advent of AI: what does it mean for the future of financial advice, how do clients expectations change with it, and how do we preserve the all-important human touch in advice and financial decision making?
Investment advisers have become accustomed to the AI discussion being framed as an existential one of whether AI will replace advisers altogether. If clients can ask ChatGPT about their portfolio, retirement strategy or investment options, how does that change the role of the adviser? If a generation of young people are accustomed to using chatbots to support decision-making, what does that mean for the future of advice?
It’s an understandable question but, like so many alarmist predictions across industry, it’s also a little too simplistic. The more urgent question should be not whether technology will replace advisers, but what are some of the innovative ways this technology can help advisers tackle the bigger challenges around the future of how wealth is held and managed in Australia.
That was one of the more urgent questions to emerge from the 2026 SIAA Conference, Investing in Growth and Resilience, which brought together more than 450 industry professionals for two days of discussion on the forces reshaping markets, advice and wealth management.
The scale of the challenge
The problems and opportunities for the wealth industry in Australia are framed by powerful structural forces. Australia has an ever-growing pool of investable assets – a household wealth pool of approximately $4.4 trillion[1], growing by an estimated $400 billion per year, while the nation enters its largest intergenerational wealth transfer on record.
One of our core challenges is the fact demand for wealth advice is rising faster than the industry’s capacity to serve it.
Fresh data presented by CoreData [2]at the SIAA Conference suggests as many as 11 million Australians may be thinking about their need for advice, while more than 3.5 million Australians have complex or very complex advice needs.
In the last seven years the number of investment advisers has almost halved from a high of almost 29,000 investment advisers at the start of 2019, to 15,059 as at 10 April 2026 – a fall of almost 48 per cent.[3]
Put simply, Australia does not have enough advisers to service the demand for advice, while the retirement wave, intergenerational wealth transfer and increasingly complex client needs are raising the stakes further.
What is becoming clear is how AI and technology sit inside that problem. These are going to be key tools to improve productivity, reduce friction, support advisers, improve governance and help firms keep investing in their growth ambitions.
In that environment, AI is not a novelty, but part of the infrastructure advice firms will need to operate sustainably.
Digital advice and the value of the ‘hybrid’ model
One powerful reminder from the conference was that the rise of digital advice does not necessitate the end of human advice.
Researcher Will Trout of Datos Insights presented findings from a study of 900 high-net-worth consumers in the US, each with at least US$5 million in investible assets, showing strong support for a ‘hybrid’ model in which digital tools support, rather than replace, a human-led advice relationship.
Hybrid advice works best when it allows clients to self-serve for simple and routine tasks, while preserving access to human judgement when decisions become complex or emotional. Retirement, estate planning, tax, market volatility, family wealth transfers and major portfolio decisions are not merely administrative events, they are consequential decisions involving a high degree of trust.
The industry is not facing a binary choice between digital and human advice. The future will be defined by how seamlessly firms can bring the two together.
Data is the new advice infrastructure
While AI brings huge promise as an enabler of productivity and scale, it remains a nascent technology with many firms still working through where it can be applied safely and efficiently. Delegates also heard from a range of wealth operators – platforms, advisers and researchers – about how AI is creating new forms of operational and conduct risk that firms need to manage now.
The message was clear: to make meaningful gains from the use of AI, advice firms need to be laser-focused on governance and data. AI can only be as useful as the information it draws on. Poor data, fragmented systems and weak governance will limit the productivity upside. The firms that benefit most will be those that have organised their data, workflows, and adoption practices properly – treating data as core advice infrastructure, not a back-office issue.
The next productivity frontier
Research by CoreData and Praemium shows advisers overwhelmingly aspire to spend more professional time with clients and less on admin, and other process-heavy work.
AI can help by compressing repetitive tasks, preparing for client conversations, generating insights, and reducing back-office friction – but it must be implemented carefully. Because AI use cases are often decentralised, experimenting without close attention can create governance challenges around data quality, privacy and accountability.
A key opportunity to drive improvement in efficiency is in compliance, where AI-enabled quality assurance can be embedded throughout the advice process – rather than applied only at the end – to help reduce errors, identify risks earlier and improve the consistency of advice.
Speaking at the Technology Enabled Advice session, Matt Esler, Founder and CEO at Padua Solutions recalled having 15 compliance managers but after introducing an AI-enabled quality assurance process, the business was able to redesign workflows and move compliance people from the back end of the process to the front. Instead of checking advice after the fact, compliance teams could be involved earlier in strategy discussions, helping advisers identify issue before advice reaches the client.
In short, the opportunity is to redesign workflows, so technology facilitates advisers to be – in the words of one delegate – “super-human”, not “super-computers.”
AI can make advice more human
Access to information does not remove the need for advice. The discussions amongst industry executives at the coalface of AI implementation revealed the many ways AI can actually enhance the value of human judgement in wealth management.
Clients may now arrive at an adviser meeting having used AI tools to research investment options or form a preliminary view of their goals.
But while AI has put more information in the hands of clients, it has not given them the ability to exercise professional judgement: to understand what applies to their circumstances, what trade-offs they face, and what decisions will best support their long-term goals.
That may increase, rather than diminish, the need for skilled advisers.
The real promise of AI in advice is not replacing the adviser but removing the process friction that gets in the way of better client conversations – freeing advisers to focus on judgement, empathy, communication and behavioural coaching: the deeply human elements of advice that clients value most.
[1] ‘Australian stockbrokers deepen advice offering as high-net worth wealth and complexity grow’ , press release by Praemium, May 20, 2026.
[2] ‘An industry in transition: the road ahead’, research presented by Andrew Inwood, Coredata, and Denis Orrock, Praemium, 20 May, 2026.
[3] SIAA submission on ‘Education Reform for Financial Advisers’, 17 April, 2026, pg. 3