In an AI world, investors still look for the human touch

Advisors, investors will always want to talk to you.

Despite living well into the digital age, surrounded by increasingly sophisticated and accessible technologies, people continue to favor other humans over machine algorithms when it comes to their finances.

A recent CFP Board survey found that 69% of investors wouldn’t be comfortable acting on AI-generated investment advice without first running it by a trusted expert – a human one. And even among younger investors, we’re still seeing a pronounced appetite for real-world partnership.

As part of its 2025 investor satisfaction survey, J.D. Power found that 27% of younger DIY investors planned to work with an advisor in the next 12 months, and that the percentage of investors looking to work with an advisor is highest among millennials and gen Z.

But while there is still clear demand for facetime and personal connection, it’s important to acknowledge the opportunity AI presents to provide more clients with increasingly holistic financial planning.

Investors don’t want to replace their advisors with AI; they want more time with their advisors. And AI has a role to play in helping streamline administrative processes so advisors can meet the client demand for deeper relationships and more personalized planning.

Not a replacement, an assistant

“Give me more time to spend with my clients.”

I hear this from advisors often, especially as we see more professionals retiring than entering the field. Existing advisors are being asked to serve more clients without compromising the quality of service. They need time to focus on their clients’ needs and financial well-being. AI delivers efficiency at a scale no previous tool has matched. Its emergence couldn’t be more opportune, helping advisors create much-needed capacity at a moment when demands on their time, service and expertise are greater than ever.

Instead of taking advisors out of the equation, these tools – particularly generative models – actually have the capacity to multiply your opportunities.

Want to get back the time you or your team spend recording, transcribing and entering meeting notes into your CRM? Try generative models focused on enhancing productivity and efficiency, like meeting summary tools. Need to streamline your research time? Let large language models (LLMs) answer queries quickly.

You can even look to AI to manage your calendar. Scheduling assistants can help you stay committed to your time blocks, and even sync to clients’ calendars to map out regular meeting cadences and handle reschedules without the typical back-and-forth.

Train it to work for you

Using AI is the key to making it more useful, particularly when the goal is to align a model to the unique way your business and client relationships operate.

Saving time starts with spending it, so don’t be afraid to explore multiple options. Test which models best suit your business needs, your management style, even your tone of voice and then use them. Often.

In our current state of play, regular use leads to refinement and the tools that become part of your business practice will get “smarter,” better able to understand your work, anticipate needs and deliver the increased professional flexibility so many of us are after.

Of course, like with anything new, proceed with some caution. AI can’t – and shouldn’t – replace people and earned wisdom. Models have been known to provide incorrect answers, false information and even to have inherent biases, making them ill-equipped for a variety of use cases like hiring.

Even for the things AI already excels at, having a human in the loop to confirm outputs is critical – let the machine do the heavy lifting, but have a person there for quality control. AI models learn and evolve, so human oversight will always be needed.

A rapidly evolving future

The rate at which AI is advancing makes it hard to confidently predict where things might stand even just a year from now, so keeping a finger on the pulse and taking the opportunity to test new capabilities that make sense for your business as they arise will be important.

Right now, for instance, most generative AI has a comfortable grasp of context – it understands the difference between the Apple Watch on your wrist, the apple that you eat and the Apple in Cupertino, California. The next phase is reasoning.

Training models on existing data and human inputs is what gave them the ability to discern context. The hope is that, with enough good training, these systems will develop the capacity for reason and reasoning will ultimately limit the need for training, making them an even more seamless part of our lives and work.

In my role as a chief AI officer, I look for “ground truths” – use cases for these models that can be 100% validated. There are two ground truths I hold for our profession: that AI will never replace advisors and that AI can make them even better professionals.

Stuart Feld is the chief artificial intelligence officer at Raymond James. He has more than three decades of experience leading global technology teams at large wealth management firms.