Human advisors still essential amid AI revolution, say fintechs

It’s been a big week for AI, with RIA custodian Altruist adding tax planning to its Hazel platform, a move which hit shares of Raymond James Financial, Inc. (Ticker: RJF) and Charles Schwab (SCHW) amid the technology’s relentless push into the financial advice industry.

While AI has sparked debate about the role of human advisors and the staff who support them, even technology providers see a future with face-to-face human interaction.

Reed Colley, president of advisor technology at Orion, acknowledges that AI is about to transform the industry. “Consumer tools are already resetting client expectations, compressing work that took hours into seconds, surfacing insights on demand,” he said, in a statement. “But they can't replicate what actually matters - human judgment, trust, and the relationships clients stake their futures on.”

“As AI handles more of the work, the human advisor becomes more essential, not less,” Colley added.

Andrew Altfest is an advisor and president at RIA Altfest Personal Wealth Management and also founder of FP Alpha, an AI-powered tax, estate and insurance planning software. AI augments advisory judgment, but it doesn’t replace it, Altfest told InvestmentNews. "Tools that parse tax documents and surface insights are valuable workflows but trusted financial advice is built on understanding client goals, risk tolerances, unique life events, and applying professional judgment," he said. Platforms, such as his own, use advisor-trained AI models to deliver insights, not rote answers, preserving human oversight and fiduciary control, Altfest added.

Ken Lotocki, chief product officer of financial planning software company Conquest Planning says it’s important to identify what is actually being disrupted by AI-powered or AI-adjacent planning tools. “It's not the advisor, but the workflow,” he said, in a statement, noting that the issue with financial planning has always been the time it takes to build, develop and present a plan.

“AI-adjacent tools have the potential to reduce that from hours to minutes and that will impact the cost of delivering advice,” Lotocki added. “To me, this means AI disruption won't replace advisors but instead make each advisor more productive.”

Altruist is pushing speed and efficiency as key benefits of its technology. The company says that the tax planning changes its Hazel AI platform will help advisors read and interpret clients’ 1040s, paystubs, account statements, meeting notes, emails, and custodial and CRM data, as well as apply “deep tax logic” to the analysis. This will all happen within minutes, according to the wealth platform.

For his part, Charles Schwab Chief Executive Rick Wurster told Bloomberg Wednesday that it was puzzling to see the company’s AI-related stock selloff. Charles Schwab, he said, is benefiting from AI in multiple ways and bringing it to the company’s clients to help them.

Danny Lohrfink, co-founder & chief product officer of estate planning platform Wealth.com said that the market has been reacting to Altruist like AI is a new threat, but it is already here. Last month Wealth.com launched its Tax Planning platform, which links tax planning, estate strategy and execution workflows in a single platform for advisors.

“We aren’t going to replace the advisor (because trust is a human-to-human business), but we sure might replace their financial analyst,” said Lohrfink, in a statement. “The days of an associate sitting in a back office manually deconstructing a 1040 or a trust document are over.”

“Tools like Hazel and Wealth.com are the 'antidote' to that overhead,” he added.

Last year Wealth.com’s CEO Rafael Loureiro told InvestmentNews that AI is turning estate planning into a mainstream financial essential.

AI's impact on the financial advisory industry shows no signs of slowing down. On Thursday, for example, Boston-based wealth management firm Claro Advisors launched an AI-native wealth management platform for independent financial advisors.

There is still strong demand for formal financial advice, according to research released Thursday by Cerulli Associates. The Cerulli Edge – U.S. Advisor Edition for the first quarter of 2026 found that just 25% of investors in their 50s, and a mere 9% of investors in their 70s, prefer an online-only investment advisor.

Of investors who strongly agree that they find online goal tools essential, the research found that 42% prefer online-only advice. Notably, an equal share, 42%, also said they would rather interact with a human advisor.