How financial advisors are actually using AI: What the research says

Will AI change the way financial advisors work (backed by the research)

Research consistently shows that AI will change how financial advisors work because the tools are now capable enough to handle the operational tasks that have always consumed advisor time without requiring their expertise.

Estate Guru's Making Sense of AI, 2026 Quarter Two Report addresses how AI can be used in a financial advisor's practice using current research.

The numbers represent how AI is perceived by financial advisors. An astounding 99% of advisors believe AI will play a significant role in the future of financial advice. Only 6% currently use it for financial plan creation. This adoption gap likely exists because the conversation around AI has moved faster than the understanding of what it actually requires. Advisors are hearing bold predictions, strong opinions, and conflicting information from every direction, and real business decisions are hard to make because the noise has outpaced the research.

Being an estate planning platform, we hear about the AI predictions and solutions too. So we did something about it. Estate Guru synthesized over 65 independent sources published between 2023 and 2026 because the approach to translate the research outcomes was missing for practical financial advisor application. The sources were independent of each other and independent of us, which means the patterns that emerged across them are more reliable than any single study conducted by one organization with a stake in the outcome.

What follows is what the research actually shows about where AI earns its place, where it creates risk, and what it means for an advisor running a practice and serving real clients.

How does AI actually work

At its core, AI identifies patterns in large amounts of data and uses those patterns to generate responses, recommendations, summaries, and predictions. Understanding that process is what separates advisors who use AI well from those who are surprised by what it gets wrong.

Most advisors have been using AI for years without calling it that. Web searches, spam filtering, fraud detection, and streaming recommendations are all forms of AI. The conversation around AI became much more visible likely because of the development of generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, and Copilot. Advisors and their clients could now ask questions, request summaries, and generate content using AI.

AI looks like it is thinking, but it is processing information. Information goes in, AI reads it as numerical patterns, and an output is generated based on what those patterns predict.

That distinction matters because an output that looks confident and reads professionally is not the same as an output that is correct, appropriate, or safe to act on. AI fills gaps with its best pattern-based guess, and that guess sounds factually true even when it is not. About 40% of AI outputs contain hallucinations likely because when the pattern recognition does not have enough reliable data, it produces an answer anyway.

Because AI uses patterns and data to draw conclusions, it cannot make judgment decisions for how to emotionally deliver the right information for the specific family an advisor is working with.

How are financial advisors actually using AI right now

Most advisors are not using AI to build financial plans because the work that requires human judgment, fiduciary accountability, and client relationships cannot be handed off to a pattern-matching tool. Financial advisors are using it to save time, reduce administrative burden, and reclaim hours that used to disappear into tasks that never required their expertise in the first place.

The current AI adoption status

AI adoption in financial services is moving more slowly than early predictions suggested, likely because getting it right requires more groundwork than most firms anticipated. An astounding 87% of financial advisors are actively exploring ways to incorporate AI into their operations. Nearly half are still holding back. The firms that are moving forward are not necessarily the ones that moved fastest, but the ones who are strategically building a foundation for how they will use AI in their firm. 

Part of that strategic foundation includes vetting tools against specific practice needs, training teams on how to use them, building policies that govern how AI is used, and cleaning up the data that feeds the tools. About half of advisor firms are currently in the process of cleaning their data, which is likely a strong reason why two thirds of organizations trying to adopt AI report only modest returns right now. The data needs to be restructured before the tools can perform well.

Leadership is what makes AI adoption work

Leadership perspective of AI can influence how likely the firm adopts AI. Roughly 81% of advisory firm leaders have built guardrails, policies, and guidelines for how their teams adopt and use AI. Firms with that governance in place are 4 times more likely to see a positive return on AI solutions. Adoption works when leadership shows teams what AI can do, sets the boundaries for how it should be used, and builds a culture where the team is trained on AI tools before they can adopt them. 

The advisors who have not yet adopted are watching how their peers are using it and learning from them. The hesitation is professional rather than personal because most advisors are already comfortable using AI in their daily lives. The concerns are about compliance exposure, accountability, and what happens when something goes wrong. Those are legitimate reasons to pause because the regulatory environment is still catching up to the technology and accountability for AI use sits with the user.

What both groups share is the same underlying question. Not whether AI works. Whether they have the foundation in place to use it in a way that actually serves their clients and protects their practice.

How do financial advisors use AI

AI can draft first versions of communications, summarize lengthy documents, organize meeting notes, create educational content, generate marketing ideas, assist with research, build client meeting preparation materials, and help standardize internal workflows because these are all pattern-based tasks that do not require human judgment to produce a useful starting point.

Think about what a typical day in an advisory practice actually looks like. Someone needs to schedule the appointments. Notes need to be taken in every meeting. Follow-up emails need to go out. Research needs to be pulled together before a client conversation. All things that keep the practice moving forward, but they are also not why most advisors got into this work. Advisors typically want to be with their clients, putting together research, strategizing plans, and having client conversations. That’s what they signed up to do, and they deserve the ability to put full attention and expertise into their work. 

AI cannot produce that same expertise and strategy that an advisor can, but it can take some of the administrative burden from the advisor. About 80% of financial advisors are already using AI to handle the pattern-based and repetitive tasks that used to consume hours every week, reclaiming 65 to 87 hours per year in the process. 

Although AI has the potential of reclaiming hours of an advisor’s time back, there should still be some caution. AI can only produce useful outputs because it has useful inputs, which means the quality of what an advisor brings to their research and client relationships is connected to the information AI is fed. Advisors seeing real returns are the ones who recognized that AI can support parts of their work, but not replace how the advisor is thinking and strategizing on the behalf of the client.

What is AI

Artificial intelligence (AI) is technology that analyzes information, recognizes patterns, and generates responses or completes tasks that traditionally required human intelligence, including summarizing documents, drafting communications, answering complex questions, and solving problems based on the instructions it receives.

The AI family tree

AI started with machine learning because the first practical application was finding patterns in data to make predictions, which is why it was used heavily for stats and predictive markets. It has grown significantly since then, especially with generative AI becoming widely accessible in 2022 and 2023. Most advisors today are working with generative AI and AI assistants, but there is growing movement toward agentic AI, where systems coordinate multiple AI tools toward a broader goal with minimal human involvement.

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Generative AI tools financial advisors are using today

Generative AI is what most people know as AI because it is the most visible and accessible form of AI. There are now several tools for advisors to choose from, and the five below are the most commonly used. What is not always known is the strengths of each one and who they are made by, and that matters when matching the right tool to the right task.

Tool	Made by	Best used for
ChatGPT	OpenAI	Drafting client communications, summarizing documents, researching planning topics, and brainstorming talking points.
Claude	Anthropic	Analyzing lengthy documents, nuanced writing tasks, and complex research questions that require careful reasoning.
Gemini	Google	Integrated workflows within Google Workspace, including drafting emails, summarizing threads, and organizing information.
Perplexity	Perplexity AI	Real-time research and sourced answers, useful for surfacing current market trends and planning topics with citations.
Copilot	Microsoft	Integrated workflows within Microsoft 365, including draft ‍ ‍ Do clients use AI for finances Consumers are beginning to use AI tools to learn about investing, retirement planning, taxes, estate planning, insurance, and budgeting. Many clients now ask AI questions before contacting a professional, much like they once started with a Google search. About 75% of people who use AI for finances say it lets them ask money questions they are too embarrassed to ask a human. Clients are using AI because it gives them a way to get up to speed privately, without judgment, and at their own pace. Some are using it to find advisors in the first place. By the time they walk into an advisor's office, they have already done some research, formed some opinions, and in many cases, acted on what AI told them. An astounding 85% of people who received AI financial advice acted on the recommendation. This is especially true for younger generations. Among Gen Z and millennials, 82% have used AI for financial advice, and they are arriving more informed because of it. But informed is not the same as having a plan. They have general answers. They do not have a strategy built around their specific income, family, goals, and future. That is what they came to an advisor for, and that is what AI cannot provide because building a strategy requires knowing the person, not just the question. Advisors are increasingly naming emotional intelligence as the top skill for the profession going forward because building a real relationship with a client requires presence, empathy, and judgment that develops over time. Nearly 7 in 10 Americans believe human advice is more powerful than any algorithm, and Americans with detailed financial plans are three times more likely to report greater happiness in money matters. AI is not going away and neither are the questions your clients are already asking about it. This report is where you start. ‍ Our Making Sense of AI Q2 2026 Quarterly Report is available now Read the report here. ‍ Our platform is attorney-led, which means we bring the attorney to you. Keep in mind: We are not a law firm and do not provide legal advice–that’s what our in-network attorneys are for. While we work to make sure our information services are accurate, they’re meant as resources. Our materials and services don’t substitute for the advice of an attorney. Written by Estate Guru Share this Table of Contents Quisque faucibus ex sapien vitae pellentesque sem Make your other newsletters jealous, subscribe to ours. Monthly industry insights, news, articles, and resources for the Estate Planning community. More from the team Blog Post Advisors Estate planning: The hidden driver of AUM retention Learn More Blog Post Advisors Planned or not—every client has an estate plan Learn More Blog Post Tax Planning How to help clients use the $28M estate tax exemption before it’s too late Learn More