AI gives your clients a financial plan for free. They are arriving with one already written.

Updated April 12, 2026

What's happening

Tools like Monarch, Copilot, and Wealthbox AI now generate comprehensive financial plans — retirement projections, tax-efficient withdrawal strategies, insurance gap analysis — in minutes. 82% of Gen Z and millennial GenAI users have already sought AI financial advice, per Intuit Credit Karma. 66% of all Americans who use GenAI have asked it for financial guidance. The baseline planning work that justified the first engagement with a new client is becoming a commodity.

The shift is visible in how prospects arrive. Five years ago, a new client came with a stack of statements and no plan. Today, they arrive with an AI-generated plan and a specific question: 'Is this right, and what did it miss?' The advisory engagement starts further along the value chain, but most firms have not repriced for that shift.

Basic financial planning — retirement projections, asset allocation recommendations, insurance needs analysis — is following the same path as tax preparation and bookkeeping. AI handles the production. The human role shifts to interpretation, exception handling, and judgment calls that require understanding the client’s full picture. Firms still selling the plan itself are selling a commodity.

Why the obvious responses don't work

“Emphasize the human relationship”

Relationships do not justify fees when the deliverable is available for free. Clients value the relationship, but they price the service. If the plan itself is commoditized, the relationship needs to deliver something the AI cannot — and that something needs its own price.

“Add AI tools to your practice”

Using AI to produce the same plan faster just accelerates the commoditization. You deliver in one meeting what used to take three, and the client wonders why three meetings were ever necessary. Speed without new offerings is margin compression.

“Focus on complexity”

AI planning tools are getting better at complexity every quarter. The edge cases you handle today will be standard outputs tomorrow. Competing on complexity is a shrinking moat.

What's working instead

Treat the AI-generated plan as the starting point, not the competition. Offer interpretation, 'here is what your plan missed,' as a fixed-fee engagement. Build ongoing retainers around the decisions AI cannot make: when to exercise stock options, how to structure a business sale for tax efficiency, whether to fund a 529 or a trust. The plan is the commodity. What to do about the plan is the premium offering.

The pattern is the same across every firm that gets this right: they stop optimizing the old model and build new offerings around what AI cannot do. That is the work we do in the Workshop.