If you’re honest, you might have wondered: is AI going to take my job, or is it going to make me better at what I do?
The truth is, AI isn’t coming for us – it’s coming alongside us. It’s reshaping our profession in ways that feel both exciting and a little daunting, but mostly exciting if we approach it right. What are the latest global insights telling us?
AI can help us serve more people affordably and effectively. Global research from the Financial Planning Standards Board (FPSB) backs this up: 78% of financial planners worldwide believe AI will help them better serve clients and 60% think it’ll improve the quality of advice overall. That’s from a survey of over 6 200 planners across 24 territories, including South Africa – so these aren’t just overseas stats; they reflect what our peers are feeling too.
And get this: of the two-thirds of firms already using AI or gearing up to in the next year, it’s the small practices and the really big ones leading the charge. Half of us planners see AI in a positive light, with just 8% feeling negative about it – that says a lot about the general optimism out there.
It is not all a bed of roses
While AI offers incredible tools for financial planners like us here in South Africa, it’s crucial that we recognise its real risks and the first one starts with the absolute necessity of keeping a human firmly in the loop.
Think of AI as a very clever parrot with fancy autocomplete functionality: it mimics patterns from enormous piles of data, but it has no genuine understanding of what it’s producing. That means every single output could be off the mark or quietly wrong, and we simply cannot trust it blindly. The same question posed to different AI models will also give vastly different answers. One model overstated retirement income drawable from a capital lump sum by a staggering 320%!
This matters enormously in our world, where we’re building retirement plans, investment portfolios and life goals for real people. When AI generates models, predictions or recommendations for a client’s financial plan, we have to check every quoted source, every assumption and every number ourselves.
I’ve seen cases where tools pull in outdated or irrelevant data without flagging it and present it as the truth. If we don’t scrutinise those outputs, we risk giving advice that looks polished but is fundamentally flawed.
So where does that leave us? Not replaced, but reframed. The planner’s role is evolving into a true human-AI partnership. We’re the interpreters, the trust-builders, the ones who ask the uncomfortable questions: “What keeps you up at night?” AI can’t do empathy, nuance or that gut feel we develop over years of sitting across from people. It augments us so we can focus on what humans do best – building relationships and guiding through uncertainty.
What can you do?
Talk to your clients about AI. Show them the different responses across different models. Show them when AI made a mistake with a calculation you asked it to do. Show them when AI got it right. Invite them to run simulations and suggestions created by AI by you first.
AI isn’t the future of financial planning – the human-AI partnership is. It lets us work smarter, reach more South Africans who need solid advice and stay relevant in a changing world. So, let’s not fear it. Let’s shape it. What’s one AI experiment you’re running in your practice right now? Drop me a note – I’d love to hear.
Stay strong out there – Zeldeen Müller
* Source: https://fpsb.org/news/global-research-reveals-how-ai-is-revolutionizing-financial-planning/
Zeldeen Müller, CFP®, is a trailblazing entrepreneur with 26 years in the retirement fund industry. As CEO of inSite Connect and creator of AgendaWorx, she launched a secure, AI-powered board portal in 2011, revolutionising secure board management. A cybersecurity expert, she ensures robust data protection. Her team’s 23 awards showcase her leadership. Müller advocates using AI cautiously, urging financial advisors to encourage clients to have AI suggestions checked by them for accuracy.
