AI may take years to reshape financial planning. The time available to build a viable alternative could be much shorter.
By Steve Conley, Founder, Academy of Life Planning
Your business is profitable. Clients are staying. The existing model still pays the bills.
Meanwhile, a new technology promises to change what customers can do for themselves and what competitors can deliver at lower cost.
When do you change?
Do you run the emerging model alongside the established one, learning while you still have money and room to manoeuvre? Or do you milk the cash cow until it loses its position, then jump on the bandwagon?
That is the practical question behind the latest warnings about AI and financial planning.
Ten years is a forecast, not a grace period
At the CISI Financial Planning Conference, Mercury Wealth Management managing director Oliver Bourke warned that traditional financial planning firms would give way within ten years to technology firms offering financial planning.
Mercury’s response includes integrating client data through Microsoft Dataverse, reducing duplication and helping advisers work more efficiently. That is a substantial operational change. But the reporting provides no forecast model to establish why the transition should take precisely ten years.
More fundamentally, the disappearance of firms and the weakening of their business models are different events.
A firm may remain open long after customers begin questioning its charges. Existing relationships can sustain revenue while the proposition becomes less attractive to new clients.
Ten years may describe the transition. It does not describe the time available to respond.
Source: Financial Planning Today
Innovation has more than one clock
There is a technology clock: when something becomes possible.
There is a customer clock: when people understand, trust and adopt it.
And there is a commercial clock: when competitors must respond because prices, expectations or buying behaviour have changed.
Those clocks rarely move together.
In US brokerage, Schwab announced zero online stock and ETF commissions on 1 October 2019, effective 7 October. TD Ameritrade introduced its own zero commissions on 3 October. Years of technological development and competitive pressure culminated in decisions separated by days.
The lesson is not that an industry appeared overnight. It is that an established price benchmark can change very quickly once a credible competitor moves.
Sources: Schwab and TD Ameritrade’s results announcement
Smartphones illustrate a longer, but still severe, displacement. Data reproduced by the World Intellectual Property Organization show Nokia’s global smartphone unit share falling from 49.2% in 2007 to 4.8% in 2012.
Five years was enough to overturn a dominant position. The commercial damage did not wait until the end of a decade.
Source: WIPO, Economics Research Working Paper No. 41
Yet automation does not always destroy an occupation. US bank teller employment increased slightly between 1980 and 2010 despite the spread of ATMs. Technology changed the economics of branches and the work people performed.
Source: Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond
These examples are illustrations, not a universal timetable. They show why “overnight” and “over ten years” can both mislead. Adoption can be gradual, competitive pressure sudden, and organisational restructuring prolonged.
The cash cow should finance the future
The cash cow metaphor comes from the Boston Consulting Group’s growth-share matrix. A cash cow has a strong relative market position in a market with low growth. A “dog” has low relative share and low growth.
These are portfolio positions, not compulsory stages through which every business passes. A cash cow does not inevitably become a dog.
However, the framework contains a useful strategic principle: cash generated by established businesses can fund opportunities with future potential.
Waiting until the established model deteriorates can reverse that logic. You need money to develop the alternative just as your capacity to fund it weakens.
There is a subtler problem, too. A profitable business can train its leaders to discount evidence of change. Every successful renewal seems to confirm the existing model. Every small experiment looks unimpressive beside the mature operation.
The new model is then judged by the old model’s immediate revenue, rather than by what it teaches you about future demand.
Use the cash cow to buy choices before declining revenue removes them.
Running parallel models means testing a different business
Putting AI into an existing workflow can improve productivity. It does not, by itself, test whether clients want a different relationship.
A meaningful parallel model changes what the customer receives, what they control and what they pay for.
For example, a planning practice could continue serving clients who value ongoing delegation while testing a distinct offer for people who want to maintain their own records, explore their own options and purchase human support at specific moments.
That experiment needs:
- A clear customer group and a problem those people want solved.
- A defined offer, with a price and appropriate service boundaries.
- Protected time and a budget the business can afford.
- Evidence of customer use, willingness to pay and cost to serve.
- A review date and criteria for expanding, revising or stopping it.
Start small enough to survive disappointment, but seriously enough to learn something.
Parallel running is not an excuse to maintain two full businesses indefinitely. It is a way to discover which model deserves more resources before financial pressure dictates the answer.
Nor should the new offer exist only to funnel everyone back into the old arrangement. That would test a marketing channel rather than an alternative business model.
Clients have AI too
Bourke’s reported argument centres on firms becoming more efficient. The Academy’s question goes further:
What happens when clients become more capable—and need less of what you currently sell?
FPSB’s 2026 research already records this development. Twenty-five per cent of surveyed planners identify validating or comparing professional advice as clients’ most common financial use of AI. Nineteen per cent report that client AI use has increased collaborative discussions.
These are planners’ observations, not direct measurements of consumer capability. Nevertheless, they indicate that the change is already reaching the client relationship.
Source: FPSB’s 2026 research announcement
A person need not replace every function of an adviser to change the economics of the relationship. They might organise their records independently, understand a document before a meeting, or arrive with better questions.
Human judgement still matters. So do reassurance, accountability, specialist knowledge and help during difficult circumstances.
The opportunity is to build a service around that changing division of work.
In the Academy ecosystem, Total Wealth Plans provides the AI operating system, while the Total Wealth Planner provides human support. The person retains their record and decision-making role, drawing on expertise when it adds value.
Continuous agency, episodic expertise.
That proposition must earn its place through customer experience, viable economics and evidence that people can understand, choose and act. Its social purpose does not exempt it from commercial testing.
“If you can’t beat them, join them”—but join what?
The proverb is of uncertain authorship, but it was recorded in American print by 1902.
Quotation researcher Fred Shapiro identifies an example in the Des Moines Homestead, dated 13 February 1902, in a passage about joining a Shorthorn cattle association. This establishes an early recorded use, rather than identifying its inventor.
An often-cited 1932 appearance in The Atlantic Monthly describes a dialect version as one of US Senator James E. Watson’s favourite sayings. The 1902 evidence predates that association by thirty years.
“If you can’t lick ’em, jine ’em”
Sources: Fred Shapiro’s 2011 account and his earlier 2009 account
Its practical meaning is familiar: when resistance cannot succeed, joining forces may serve you better.
For planners, the important question is who—or what—you join.
You can join the race to automate the existing service. You can also work alongside increasingly capable clients, helping them use their own systems and identify when human expertise is needed.
Both require adaptation. They answer different questions about where future value will sit.
Joining the bandwagon after your revenue weakens may be necessary. Building a tested alternative while you still have resources gives you more control over the destination.
Change before you have to—but expand when the evidence supports it
My view is that businesses should begin testing when there is credible evidence that technology is changing customer capability or competitive economics.
They should expand when the alternative demonstrates demand, useful outcomes and a viable cost to serve.
They should retire or reshape the established offer when its economics, relevance or customer value no longer justify maintaining it.
Those are three separate decisions. None requires an accurate prediction of the year traditional firms disappear.
For financial planners, the next practical step is to identify one valuable offer for clients who want greater control, test it with a defined group, and assess what they actually use and pay for.
Through the Academy of Life Planning, we help practitioners explore that transition towards agency-led support. The aim is to build a business that remains useful as the person becomes more capable.
Will your current success finance your next model—or persuade you to postpone it until you can no longer afford the transition?
