- 82% of financial advisors now use AI, and 69% say it's had a positive impact on the industry.
- The dominant use is reclaiming time for clients: 53% of advisors see AI mainly as a way to focus on higher-value client work.
- AI's strengths are prep and admin - research, portfolio summaries, meeting notes - not the relationship, which is where advisors' value has actually moved.
- 97% of advisors say client conversations have expanded beyond investing to life decisions and financial anxiety - exactly the human work AI can't do.
For financial advisors, AI has arrived at the same moment the job itself is changing - and the two trends point in the same direction. The direct answer: AI is most valuable to advisors for the preparation and administration around client work - research, summaries, meeting notes - which frees time for the relationship and guidance that has become the real center of the role, and that AI can't replace.
Adoption is already the majority
This is a mainstream tool now, not an edge experiment. 82% of advisors already use AI in their practice, and 69% say it's had a positive impact on the industry. Adoption is fastest among employee advisors (73%, up from 44% a year earlier), with independents rising too. And critically, advisors see it as opportunity, not threat: 53% view AI primarily as a way to focus on higher-value client work. That framing - AI clears the prep so I can be more present with clients - is exactly the healthy pattern.
Where AI actually helps an advisory practice
Research and analysis. Synthesizing market information, summarizing holdings, and pulling together the background for a client meeting in a fraction of the manual time.
Meeting prep and notes. Drafting meeting summaries, action items, and follow-ups so the advisor is present in the conversation instead of scribbling through it.
Client communication. Personalized updates and check-ins at a scale a solo advisor or small team can't manage by hand.
These are the time-heavy, judgment-light tasks around advising - the prep work that used to consume evenings. By 2026, an estimated 25% of advisor-client interactions will be mediated by AI in some way, largely at this administrative layer.
Why the relationship is exactly what AI can't touch
Here's the trend that makes AI's role clear. 97% of advisors say client conversations have changed in recent years, expanding well beyond investing into wealth transfer, financial anxiety, life decisions, and broader worries. That is the heart of modern advising - and it's precisely the human, judgment-and-empathy work AI cannot do. (Tellingly, while 40% of high-net-worth individuals are comfortable with purely AI-generated investment recommendations, the relationship and the hard conversations remain firmly human.) The more AI absorbs the prep, the more an advisor's time flows to exactly the part clients value most. AI doesn't diminish the role; it concentrates it on the relationship.
What this means for advisors building AI skills
The advisors getting the most from AI understand their clients and their practice well enough to direct it precisely and keep it to the administrative layer - which is judgment, not technical skill. That's the MakerSquare premise. Our use cases show what building tools around a real professional workflow looks like, with the relationship kept human.
AI won't have the hard conversation with a client about their retirement fears. It'll just give the advisor more time to.
MakerSquare is a 2-week in-person AI builder program in Austin, TX for professionals who want to build AI into the prep and admin of their work while keeping the client relationship human. See what two weeks of hands-on building looks like.