When I started in this industry nearly 30 years ago, the biggest technology fear in every office was not AI; it was the fax machine jamming your quotes. Every new technology terrifies the profession for a season, then becomes the new normal and what clients want from us does not move a millimetre.
A client sits in an advisor’s office today having already asked an AI chatbot about retirement annuities and tax-free savings accounts. The tool has changed beyond recognition. The need underneath it has not.
That is the pattern I want to walk you through. Writing, the printing press, steam power, electricity, the telegraph, broadcast media, computing, the Internet, social media and now AI; each has changed what our clients do. None has changed what they need. Through every one of those revolutions, the need for trust, empathy and human connection stayed exactly where it was.
Writing gave societies a memory longer than any single life. Laws, trade and history could be recorded rather than carried in someone’s head. A society no longer needed to remember everything; it could write it down. But writing also concentrated power in the hands of the few who could read and ordinary people still needed someone to interpret what had been recorded. Sound familiar?
The printing press took centuries to change the who but never touched the need. Text moved from something only the elite controlled into something merchants and tradespeople could get their hands on. Trust in institutions did not disappear. It simply moved from the scribe’s desk to the editor’s and then to the publisher who decided which articles to print.
Steam power and electricity industrialised production and changed daily life at a pace that frightened as many people as it freed. British handloom weavers fell from around 250 000 to 7 000 within 60 years, and the Luddites smashed machinery in protest because they hated what falling wages were doing to their families.
Electricity told a similar story, taking decades of scepticism before households trusted it enough to wire their homes. Its share of installed power in American manufacturing rose from under 5% in 1899 to more than half by 1919.
Twenty years to go from curiosity to backbone of an economy. Every wave of automation since has repeated the same fear, and each one has eventually created work nobody could have described beforehand.
The telegraph and telephone squeezed distance down to seconds, and markets started coordinating and moving prices in real time. Yet, a telegram could never carry what a face-to-face conversation could, and personal relationships kept their value even after remote communication normalised.
Radio and television forged a kind of mass togetherness that earlier technologies simply couldn’t produce. American television ownership went from around 17 000 sets in 1946 to two thirds of all households within seven years. Even so, people still looked for the voices they trusted, not the loudest one on the dial.
Computing and the Internet handed research to anyone with a connection, and that was the end of our monopoly on financial information. Mobile and cloud technology made access constant, and clients started comparing the experience of dealing with a firm as much as its technical competence. Social media added peer influence, with finfluencers promoting products, sometimes without disclosing they were paid to.
The Reuters Institute’s 2025 Digital News Report found that social media and video have overtaken television as the leading news source for many audiences, most of all among people under 35. Every one of these shifts gave clients more information. More access. More noise. And everyone increased their need for someone credible to help make sense of it.
Is AI different this time?
AI follows this pattern in some ways and breaks it in others. Like every technology before it, AI has triggered the same mix of anxiety, slow adoption followed by a rush once people see what it can do. According to the FPSB’s Global Research Report 2025, based on a survey of over 6 000 planners across 24 territories, planners use AI mostly for client communication, data collection and risk profiling with the greatest value coming from administrative streamlining rather than planning decisions.
The 2026 Financial Planning Growth Index found the same story locally: 42% name technology investment as their top driver of future efficiency, yet 70% expect staffing levels to stay unchanged. We are using AI to work faster, not replace the relationship at the centre of our business.
Here is where AI genuinely breaks the pattern. Steam extended human muscle, the telegraph extended human senses and computing extended our organisational capacity. Generative AI extends something closer to human cognition itself. It reasons, drafts and answers in a tone of calm authority that a client with no way of checking will often mistake for real expertise.
A 2025 Credit Karma survey found that roughly two in three adults who have used AI for financial advice have gone on to act on it, climbing to 82% among Gen Z and millennial users. Three in four say AI lets them ask the questions they would be too embarrassed to ask a human advisor. Our clients are arriving pre-informed, sometimes misinformed, on a scale we have never seen before.
That combination creates what researchers call a trust paradox. Clients happily let AI handle low-stakes questions, trusting its confident tone quickly. But when a decision matters, they still want a human they can hold accountable. This is exactly where our value sits now.
AI can give a client a plausible answer about a retirement drawdown rate in three seconds flat. It cannot sit across the table from a grieving widow, tell when a client is about to act out of fear rather than reason or carry the weight of getting it wrong. That is still entirely on us.
What this means closer to home
There is a distinctly South African angle to this. AI models trained mostly on global data do not automatically know our tax law, our Regulation 28 restrictions or the finer points of the FAIS Act and the FSCA’s conduct standards, and clients rarely know to check for that gap before acting on what a chatbot has told them.
The FSCA and the Prudential Authority released a joint report on AI in our financial sector in November 2025, based on around 2 100 survey responses, and found that 21% of financial institutions use no explainability method at all for their AI systems. One in five firms cannot tell you how their own AI reached a decision.
Add the rise of deepfake fraud, with fraud attempts up 21% year on year globally, and we are no longer just verifying information. We are verifying identity itself. POPIA already requires us to handle client data responsibly. That same discipline now needs to stretch to the person or the deepfake on the other end of a call.
The FPI Code of Ethics has always asked us to act with integrity, objectivity and competence. Nobody wrote those words with AI in mind, yet all three now apply to how we use it. A recommendation shaped by a model we cannot explain tests the exact standard that Code protects. The compliance question is no longer only whether the advice is suitable, but whether we can explain and defend the process behind it.
Why the human premium keeps rising
Every technology on this list eventually made the people who adapted to it more capable, not less relevant. The lesson from 5 000 years of general-purpose technology is remarkably consistent. Every wave gives people more information and speed, and none removes the need for a person who can be trusted, understands a client’s actual circumstances and is willing to be accountable for the advice given.
AI is the first technology capable of simulating expertise itself, which is why trust, empathy, ethical judgement and accountability are becoming more valuable, not less.
Our role has moved from gatekeeper of information to portfolio manager, to curator and ethical anchor. We help clients navigate what the machines produce. We do not compete with them to produce it.
Use AI for the administrative work it does well. Double down on the conversations only you can have. Do that, and this cycle will look familiar after all. It changes what we do every day. It will not change why our clients need us.
Stay curious!
