“If we train AI on product pipelines, it will entrench dependency.
If we train it on human purpose, it will amplify sovereignty.”
Artificial intelligence is transforming finance — but so far, it’s been trained to think like a salesperson, not a human being.
Recent moves by big tech into financial advice (see below) signal a powerful trend: AI systems designed to deliver “personalised recommendations” are being built almost entirely within the existing retail-investment framework.
That’s a space representing barely 1% of the average person’s total wealth [see souce below] — and yet it’s being treated as the whole picture.
⚙️ The Narrow Lens of “AI Advice”
When today’s financial AIs talk about “advice,” they’re not referring to the complex, creative process of building a meaningful life. They’re referring to regulated product intermediation — investment wrappers, risk models, and compliance reports.
They can optimise portfolios to perfection, but they don’t understand people.
They’re blind to the 19% of wealth held in property, pensions, and savings — and the 80% that exists in human capital: our skills, health, relationships, and capacity to create value over a lifetime.
This is the quiet capture of AI — a digital mirror of the old system, polished to look like progress.
💡 A Different Vision for the Future
Imagine an AI trained not on products, but on people.
An AI that helps you plan your life before your money.
That understands your values, your purpose, your aspirations.
That measures success not by market performance, but by wellbeing, fulfilment, and contribution.
This is the future we’re building at the Academy of Life Planning.
We call it the Open Holistic Wealth Architecture — a public-interest framework that aligns technology with human flourishing.
🧭 The Architecture for Empowerment
At its core lies a new Holistic Wealth Ontology — an open data language that recognises every part of the human story:
- Life goals and values – the why behind the plan
- Human capital – skills, health, and creativity
- Financial capital – both retail and non-retail
- Wellbeing – emotional, social, intellectual, spiritual
This structure is powered by AoLP’s GAME Plan™ (Goals, Actions, Means, Execution) and Kokoro Scorecard, which help people measure and grow their holistic wealth.
It’s not “robo-advice.” It’s life-intelligence — an AI trained on purpose, empathy, and enoughness.
⚖️ Why This Matters Now
If we don’t broaden the frame, the next generation of financial intelligence will be written by — and for — the same distribution networks that have long dominated the industry.
That would mean digital advice that’s safe for compliance, but unsafe for humanity.
The alternative is open, transparent, and collaborative — an ecosystem where citizens, planners, and technologists co-train AI to serve the public good.
🌱 Building Together
At AoLP, we’re inviting policymakers, planners, and citizens to join us in building a world where:
- Advice begins with life planning, not product selection.
- AI supports self-reliance, not dependency.
- Financial wellbeing includes purpose, health, and happiness.
We’re developing open standards, ethical frameworks, and pilot projects to prove that life-first guidance can coexist with — and strengthen — regulation, trust, and transparency.
💬 Closing Thought
AI will soon sit beside every human decision — in finance, health, work, and family.
Our task now is to ensure it reflects the best of us, not the narrowest of us.
Let’s teach the machines to understand what it means to live well.
Let’s build intelligence that empowers, not extracts.
👉 Join the movement.
#AIForGood #HolisticWealth #LifePlanning #FinancialEmpowerment #HumanCapital #EthicalAI #Transparency #MPOWER #FutureOfAdvice #OpenAI
🧭 Public Commentary: The OpenAI Acquisition of Roi — What It Means for Financial Advice
The acquisition of Roi, a personal finance and investment app, by OpenAI marks a defining moment in the evolution of financial services. For the first time, the world’s leading general intelligence platform has taken a direct step into the territory of financial guidance — and the implications are profound.
This move signals that the boundaries between AI reasoning and financial intermediation are dissolving. The next generation of AI systems will not simply answer questions — they will anticipate financial behaviour, simulate outcomes, and potentially deliver guidance once considered the exclusive domain of regulated professionals.
For the financial advice profession, this is both a challenge and an invitation.
⚙️ The Challenge: AI at Scale, Advice at Risk
OpenAI’s integration of Roi’s capabilities allows for personalised insights across millions of users at negligible marginal cost. It compresses the traditional advice model into a real-time, conversational interface capable of portfolio monitoring, financial planning, and automated nudging.
For large segments of the retail market — particularly those underserved by advisers — this will be a compelling offer. But it also risks redefining “advice” in purely transactional terms, aligning it with investment recommendations and cashflow analytics rather than the deeper, human dimensions of planning.
If left unchecked, this shift could cement an industrial model of advice: efficient, compliant, but emotionally and ethically hollow.
🌍 The Opportunity: Reclaiming the Human Frontier
Where AI excels in calculation, humans excel in meaning.
The profession’s opportunity lies in reclaiming the 80% of wealth that AI cannot yet see — the realm of human capital, wellbeing, and purpose.
Advisers who reframe their role from product selection to life alignment will not compete with AI — they’ll collaborate with it. They can use AI to automate the mechanical, while deepening the relational: guiding values, resilience, legacy, and the psychology of money.
In this future, AI becomes the junior colleague, not the competitor — helping citizens build capability, not dependency.
💡 The Industry’s Strategic Crossroads
The financial sector now faces a fundamental choice:
- Commercial Capture: Train AI on industry data, embedding the old extractive model in new code.
- Collaborative Empowerment: Train AI on human experience, creating a life-first, transparent, and inclusive ecosystem.
The first path leads to automated intermediation — more efficient sales funnels disguised as digital advice.
The second leads to citizen empowerment — AI as a companion for self-understanding, holistic planning, and social wellbeing.
OpenAI’s move is a warning shot to the incumbents building closed, product-led AI systems. Their commercial advantage may now erode rapidly as open, large-scale intelligence becomes the platform of choice.
🌱 The Future Belongs to Life-First Planners
For advisers and wealth managers, survival will depend on integration, not imitation.
Those who use AI to serve the whole person — aligning financial architecture with life purpose — will become the architects of a new profession: the Holistic Wealth Planners of the AI age.
Their competitive edge won’t be speed or scale, but depth, conscience, and trust — the things machines can amplify, but never replace.
Sources: FCA regulated investments represent just 1% of total wealth of the average Brit (the 1% Club).
- UK Household Wealth Composition: [Financial Capital] Property (~40%) → Occupational Pensions (~40%) → Savings (~10%) → Investments (~5%) — Source: Office for National Statistics, Wealth and Assets Survey (WAS), Tables 5.1 & 5.12, April 2020 – March 2022.
- Stoican, M. (2013). Investment in human capital and its multiplier effect. Advances in Fiscal, Political and Law Science (pp. 54–61). Transilvania University of Brașov.
Ibbotson, R. G., & Brinson, G. P. (1989). Global investing: The professional’s guide to the world capital markets. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill. According to Stoican (2013), citing Ibbotson and Brinson (1989), Human Capital (present value of future earnings) represents roughly 80% of national wealth in developed economies. - Lifetime Financial Advice: A Personalized Optimal Multilevel Approach, with a foreword by Roger G. Ibbotson – Published by CFA Institute Research Foundation. Total Wealth = Financial Capital + Human Capital.
Academy of Life Planning 
So important ! Looking forward to hearing more.