A firm can become more efficient while its clients remain just as dependent. That is the question beneath this week's agentic AI announcements. Imagine joining a wealth management firm. You upload identification, answer questions about your finances and supply documents. An AI agent notices what is missing, prepares the forms, starts identity and sanctions checks, … Continue reading Who Is the AI Operating System For?
Tag: chatgpt
Customers Have AI Too!
The profession is asking how AI can make advisers more productive. What happens when it makes customers more capable? This week, financial planners gather in Windsor to “turn the page on established thinking”. Here is the page I would turn. Imagine your next prospective client arriving on a video call. They have organised their financial … Continue reading Customers Have AI Too!
Who validated the warning about AI and your money?
An evidence audit of a financial AI headline, its commercial context and the poll that followedSteve Conley | Academy of Life Planning | 23 September 2026 I watched a poll ask people how much of their money they would let AI decide with. Before they answered, it told them that chatbots had got 57% of … Continue reading Who validated the warning about AI and your money?
Trust, Curiosity and Optimism in the Age of AI
The qualities that help leaders reimagine institutions can also prevent them from seeing what their institutions have become Trust, curiosity and optimism sound like exactly the qualities leaders need in the age of AI. Charlie Nunn, chief executive of Lloyds Banking Group, recently discussed all three in a McKinsey interview about institutional longevity, technological change … Continue reading Trust, Curiosity and Optimism in the Age of AI
Before asking whether AI gives the wrong financial advice, we should ask whether the industry has been measuring the right kind of wealth
A striking headline appeared in Financial Reporter: “AI models give wrong financial advice 57% of the time.” The claim came from research commissioned by financial technology company Saturn. It reportedly tested 18 AI models using 121 financial questions, repeated five times, producing more than 10,000 responses. Across those responses, 57% were classified as wrong. On … Continue reading Before asking whether AI gives the wrong financial advice, we should ask whether the industry has been measuring the right kind of wealth
The Future Isn’t Trusted AI. It’s Capable Humans Using AI.
People are already asking AI what to buy, what to invest in, what something means and what they should do next. There is just one problem. They do not necessarily trust the answers. Recent McKinsey research found significant scepticism towards algorithm-driven sources of information, with trust in generative AI below 40 per cent. Yet consumers … Continue reading The Future Isn’t Trusted AI. It’s Capable Humans Using AI.
The Age of Aquarius Is Not Something That Happens to Us. It Is Something We Build.
Restoring human agency in the age of AI For most of human history, power has followed scarcity. If knowledge was scarce, those who possessed knowledge held power. If capital was scarce, those who controlled capital held power. If access to markets, institutions, law, medicine, education or professional expertise was scarce, the organisations controlling that access … Continue reading The Age of Aquarius Is Not Something That Happens to Us. It Is Something We Build.
The First Dividend From AI May Be an Agency Dividend Before It Becomes a Financial Dividend
On 25 August 2026, McKinsey published two complementary pieces on the next stage of artificial intelligence: its global survey, The State of AI in 2026: On the Road to ROI, and a shorter commentary, Four Perspectives on What Matters Now in AI. Together, they reveal an important tension. AI adoption is accelerating, individual productivity and … Continue reading The First Dividend From AI May Be an Agency Dividend Before It Becomes a Financial Dividend
Use AI at Your Own Risk? What About the Risk of Having No Help at All?
City AM reports that the FCA has warned consumers using AI for investment decisions that they may have little or no regulatory protection if things go wrong. That is an important point. But it also raises a bigger question that the warning itself does not really answer: what is the realistic alternative for people who … Continue reading Use AI at Your Own Risk? What About the Risk of Having No Help at All?
Who Gets the Decision Dividend? AI Is Making Intelligence Cheap. Financial Services Has Not Yet Passed the Saving to the Customer.
McKinsey’s 26 August 2026 article, “The decision dividend: How AI creates economic value,” caught my attention because it describes, in corporate terms, something very close to the shift we have been exploring in financial planning. Its central argument is that AI’s biggest economic gains may not come from replacing labour, but from making better decisions … Continue reading Who Gets the Decision Dividend? AI Is Making Intelligence Cheap. Financial Services Has Not Yet Passed the Saving to the Customer.
