Clients present advisers with a list of AI-generated questions

Steve Sanduski, CFP®

This week, two of my financial advisor coaching clients, unprompted, told me they had clients present them with a list of AI-generated questions that their clients wanted them to answer.

What’s starting to happen is AI is being inserted between the client’s life and the advisor conversation.

Today, clients have access to “question abundance.” Simply prompt AI and presto, out pop 20 questions they ask you to answer.

From there, it’s not a big leap for the client to simply ask the AI to answer those questions and then ask you to defend what you’ve been doing or justify why you haven’t done what AI recommended. What happens if you disagree with what the AI recommends?

Eventually, and I know some of you may disagree with this, many humans may trust the output of their AI more than they trust the advice from other humans. It’s already happening as studies have shown some people prefer AI counselors over human counselors.

Where will all this lead in the next decade?

Nobody knows, but, here are three (somewhat) educated thoughts.

1) People will still delegate in a world of abundant AI. I could do my own taxes but I’m happy to pay someone to do it for me so I can spend my time on more enjoyable things. I think the mass affluent who historically delegated to a traditional full suite financial advisor will remain, albeit at a lower percentage than the past as it becomes easier at the margin to DIY.

2) The economics of delegation will change. The big firms like Fidelity, Schwab, Vanguard, BlackRock, and the $100B+ RIAs, etc., will use AI and their scale to offer solid advice to the mass affluent at a very low price. It may actually increase the demand for advice at this level but make it harder for traditional advisors to compete. As a result, I’m encouraging my coaching clients to keep moving toward wealthier delegators who want human personalization and interaction.

3) Quadruple down on being a “great advisor.” Because of AI, technical answers are just a prompt away. But a great advisor combines judgment + discernment + communication + understanding the client + knowing when to act + knowing when not to act. That’s always been true but in the AI age, those who embody this will take massive market share from those who don’t.

For example, an average advisor will get 20 AI-generated questions from a client and answer them.

A “great advisor” says:

“These are good questions. But 18 of them aren't particularly important for you. These seven are and here’s how we’ve dealt with them. These two questions are based on assumptions that don’t apply to you. And there's one question AI didn't ask that it should have and here’s what we’ve already done about it on your behalf.” Boom!

Like every bold technological leap, some will get left behind while others will surge ahead. It’s still early enough that you can become the latter.

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I think this is one of the more perceptive adviser-side observations about AI, but he gets very close to the deeper structural change and then retreats back into the traditional adviser model.

The strongest sentence is this:

“AI is being inserted between the client’s life and the advisor conversation.”

I think that framing is backwards.

AI is not necessarily being inserted between the client and adviser. It is being inserted between the client and their problem.

That distinction matters enormously.

Historically, when someone encountered complexity, the route looked like:

Life → problem → adviser → answer → client

The adviser controlled much of the expertise, interpretation and often execution. Information asymmetry made that economically viable.

AI makes another pathway possible:

Life → problem → client + AI → understanding → decision

Then, where complexity, uncertainty, consequences or emotion justify it:

client + AI → human second brain → client decision

That is much closer to your three-brains idea: the client's brain, the AI brain and the professional brain. The professional should complement the other two, not substitute for them.

Where Sanduski is particularly revealing is his conclusion from point 2. He correctly identifies that AI will make mass-affluent advice dramatically cheaper. But his strategic response is:

move toward wealthier delegators.

That preserves the existing business model by changing the target customer.

Instead of asking:

“How do we redesign financial planning now that expertise is abundant?”

the answer becomes:

“Where can advisers still find clients wealthy enough to pay for delegation?”

That may be perfectly rational business coaching. But it isn't really a response to the technological transformation. It is moving upstream to protect the economics of intermediation.

There is another assumption embedded in “people will still delegate.” Of course they will. The interesting question isn't whether delegation disappears.

It is: what should be delegated, for how long, and who retains decision-capital?

I might happily delegate filing my tax return. I don't therefore need my accountant permanently sitting between me and every financial decision I make.

Delegation can be task-specific and episodic without becoming a permanent relationship of dependency.

His “great adviser” example is actually very good:

18 aren't important; seven are; two rest on wrong assumptions; one important question wasn't asked.

That is precisely where humans remain valuable.

But notice what the adviser is providing there: not information, and not necessarily continuous management.

They are providing:

judgment, prioritisation, context and challenge.

That's Second Brain territory.

The irony is that AI may make the genuinely great adviser more valuable while making the traditional ongoing-adviser relationship less necessary.

So I think there are really three possible responses to AI:

1. Defend intermediation — find wealthier people willing to delegate everything.

2. Automate intermediation — use AI to deliver the same ongoing model more cheaply.

3. Disintermediate intelligently — give people powerful tools and bring human expertise in when judgment genuinely adds value.

The third is the interesting one.

And I think there's an even bigger implication in his opening story. Clients arriving with AI-generated questions shouldn't primarily be seen as a new challenge for advisers to manage.

It is evidence that clients are arriving with more agency.

That should be welcomed.

The future adviser shouldn't be asking, “How do I remain the person with the answers?”

They should be asking:

“Now that my client has another brain available to them, where does my brain genuinely add something?”

That is a much healthier economic and professional question.

And it leads straight back to the distinction we've been developing:

continuous agency, with episodic expertise — rather than continuous expertise with episodic agency.