The traditional view of financial planning is that advisors are experts, who learn a specialized base of technical knowledge (e.g., CFP certification), and leverage that knowledge to collect information about clients' current situation and future goals and craft recommendations about what course of action clients can take to get from here to there. In this context, clients come with questions, financial advisors provide the answers, and then clients implement the recommendations (or subsequently delegate those steps to the financial advisor altogether). Yet in recent decades, this paradigm has begun to shift as the internet provides consumers near-unlimited access to information themselves… and now seems to be coming to a head with AI chatbot tools that allow a client to feed an advisor's entire financial plan and recommendations into the engine and come back with questions to challenge what their advisor said!
In this guest post, Dr. Meghaan Lurtz, a leading expert on the psychology of financial planning and Professor of Practice at Kansas State University, discusses how in reality clients coming back with AI-informed questions may not be a signal that technology is undermining financial advisors, and instead indicates that clients are more proactively engaging with their financial advisor in what could become a boon to advisor-client engagement!
When advisors have had years and decades of experience as being "the authority" on financial planning issues that their clients ask questions about, it's only natural to feel challenged when comes begin to double-check what their advisors have said using AI. Yet the reality is that clients who don't understand their financial planning recommendations aren't going to implement… and in the past, clients who didn't understand had little way to learn more, and may not have even known what questions they should be asking to better engage in the process. Whereas now, when clients leverage AI for themselves in a planning engagement, it creates a form of 'hybrid' model that makes it easier for them to engage proactively with their advisor!
After all, if clients really want to circumvent an advisor's advice, they can already do so; they simply go open the trading account, or buy the crypto, or purchase the boat, and don't bring it up to the advisor they already knew would likely tell them not to. The mere fact that clients choose to bring questions back from their AI output and ask "What do you think about this?" means there is a desire to take the conversation with their advisor even deeper. In turn, this means that advisors who invite clients further into the (AI-prompted) conversation create more opportunity for clients to be heard, which further increases the likelihood they'll follow through!
Advisors who want to lean in further and turn client AI-prompted challenges into more constructive conversations can use a four-part framework: first thank the client (I'm really glad you brought this up. This is exactly the kind of conversation I want us to be having), then listen ("What was it about this idea that got you excited? What's the part that feels right to you?") before offering to share perspective ("I appreciate you sharing all of that. Can I offer some additional context that might be helpful as you think this through?"), which opens the door to better understand ("I can see why that strategy looks attractive. Here's the piece I'd want us to stress-test before making a move — what do you think?"), to finally co-create a new future with the client ("This was a great conversation. Keep bringing me what you're finding — this is how we make the plan better together.").
Ultimately, though, the key point is to recognize that clients who bring questions that seemingly are "challenging" their advisor are probably not doing so because they're unhappy or don't value their advisor; it's a pathway for clients to engage with their advisor more deeply, with greater confidence, because the AI may have helped them better get up to speed on what questions to ask, what conversations to have, and in the process may better surface the values and goals that are really most important to them. Which isn't unique to financial advisors; when a patient tells their doctor, "I looked up my symptoms on WebMD," a good doctor doesn't say, "Stop Googling things." A good doctor says, "Tell me what you found and what concerned you", and the patient leaves that appointment feeling heard. The same door of opportunity is now opening for financial advisors, too!
