Financial advisers are warming to AI handling administrative work but want to maintain human oversight for tasks that directly affect client money, according to a new report.
The findings are from a survey of 178 financial advisers carried out by platform engine provider GBST and financial services consultancy The Lang Cat.
The survey found that most advisers were comfortable with Artificial Intelligence tools handling high-volume, rules-based tasks - such as collating data for annual reviews (80%) and onboarding (77%) - but were less comfortable with AI making decisions about where to move client money.
For pension transfers, 43% of advisers were comfortable with AI, while for CIP (Centralised Investment Proposition) switches and rebalancing 53% were comfortable.
When explaining where they would like the boundary for AI to be, advisers said they wanted the ability to supervise and check outputs before any changes were actioned.
The research also found that familiarity with agentic AI was patchy. A third (31%) of advisers were unable to describe what it does, and a similar number (29%) could not identify its core capability of breaking tasks into steps, planning the workflow and carrying it through automatically.
However, when shown a description of agentic AI, nearly two-thirds (62%) of the advisers surveyed said they were comfortable with it being embedded in their platform.
Agentic AI systems can independently plan, reason, and take multi-step actions to achieve a goal. Traditional AI waits for a prompt and stops, whereas agentic AI takes a broad goal and figures out the steps needed on its own to meet the goal. Agentic AI can also change its approach if something fails.
Rob DeDominicis, CEO of GBST, said: “Rather than resisting AI, advisers have drawn a sensible boundary around it. They are comfortable with agentic AI taking on the high-volume administrative tasks, like reconciliation and collation of data. This is necessary work, but it takes up time without adding visible value for clients.
“Where client money is directly at stake, they want human oversight, but that doesn't mean doing everything manually. On more involved processes such as transfers, it's about keeping people at the decision points while the system carries out the firm's own procedure and records every step.
“The Mills Review makes the same distinction, recommending the FCA monitors this closely. Advisers have effectively drawn that line themselves.”
• The Lang Cat surveyed 178 adviser on behalf of GBST.