AI gives your clients a financial plan for free. They’re arriving with one already written.
What’s happening
A client can ask a free chatbot for a financial plan and get a plausible draft in minutes. 82% of Gen Z and millennial GenAI users have sought AI financial advice, 66% of GenAI users overall, per Intuit Credit Karma. 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 haven’t 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: the software does more of the production each year, and the advisor’s 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 don’t 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 can’t, and that something needs its own price.
“Add AI tools to your practice”
Using AI to produce the same plan faster 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”
The free 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 can’t 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. The Workshop is the facilitated day we do this work with you. You leave with 2–3 offering briefs, specified and priced. Your team tests them with named clients, then builds what earns it.
Offerings that address this
Tax-aware investment management
Direct indexing plus a structured annual tax-planning cycle, priced as a discrete service tied to client-realized tax outcomes rather than bundled into the investment management fee.
AI-augmented estate planning advisory
Document intake and AI summarization, advisor-led strategy and beneficiary review, attorney coordination, priced per engagement or as a planning retainer.
Other pressures on Financial Advisory Firms
The same pressure in other industries
Related reading
The Cut Your Clients Already Planned
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What Your Clients Say About AI When You’re Not in the Room
Your clients have opinions about your firm’s AI capability. They’re sharing those opinions with everyone except you.
$15,000
Two days from start to delivery, one on site with your senior team, then 2–3 offering briefs, specified and priced.
Book a conversation30 minutes with Shawn Yeager. No pitch.