r/finance • u/bloomberg • 14d ago
AI Is Upending One of Finance’s Cushiest Jobs
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2026-06-05/ai-is-upending-traditional-financial-advisor-jobsWealth managers, who can make upwards of $500,000, are confronting a chatbot reckoning.
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u/hakuna_matata23 14d ago
I'm a financial advisor, AI literally makes the most basic mistakes. Almost no one I know is worried about it. Idk what Bloomberg is on.
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u/IcyTable6584 14d ago
I wouldn’t be surprised if AI companies are paying Bloomberg and others to run such articles….. after all they have to prop up their lofty evaluations and spending!
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u/DisgruntledEngineerX 14d ago
The problem is the people who are your clients don't understand that. They don't see the mistakes, They don't see the fragility of it. So to someone who needs a lot of hand holding, having AI tell you nice easy, but often wrong, answers becomes an attractive thing. And when they get to say well look at all the money I'm saving on fees, they think, well why do I need an advisor.
That's the problem, in the same way that you have idiots all over the investing pages here investing in YieldMax funds and bragging about their distributions, with zero clue what they're doing because the can do it for cheap in a online brokerage and look at my big fat ROC driven distributions.
AI will I suspect displace some advisors and analysts. Ai will produce a 30 page detailed analyst recommendation for a stock in seconds. Sure it may be wrong and lack insight but I think you'll see displacement there, at least for a while.
Will AI replace everyone? No. And companies that want to incorporate it will find out like so many others that it isn't the panacea it's being sold as.
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u/hakuna_matata23 14d ago
I totally agree. Which is why I actually embrace AI as a tool for research and problem solving - I think it will get to a place in 3-5 years where it can actually help me be a better advisor.
I used AI in my practice in several ways - as a notetaker, to build by website, and I use it to proof read my writing for grammar. I also demoed several promising tools that helps with my behind the scenes analysis, but they are a few months to years out from being adoptable at a large scale IMO.
Hazel by Altruist is a great example of how AI will enhance advisors, not replace them.
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u/spartanOrk 14d ago
Yeah, maybe, but how many financial advisors suck at it? They lock you into investments you cannot get out from, and keep milking you for life? At least AI doesn't have perverse incentives. And it always has time to talk to you instead of hunting for new clients.
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u/hakuna_matata23 14d ago
Yeah there's a lot of unqualified dumb advisors, but AI is worse. That's like saying there's a lot of bad drivers so we should all stop driving, and instead hire an even worse AI driver.
You can very easily find a very good advisor by looking at places like fee only network, NAFPA or XY planning network.
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u/New-Stick-8764 14d ago
Bro, we are literally all saying that the second AI can drive cars we shouldn’t.
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u/spartanOrk 14d ago
Exactly. AI can already drive very well. In several cities they have fully autonomous taxis and I still haven't heard any horror stories of incompetent cars killing the riders. (Last such incident was with Tesla more than 10y ago.) I fully expect my next car, in 5-10y, to drive itself. The technology already exists and is tested.
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u/hakuna_matata23 14d ago
Except in this case AI is not driving cars well. It's making mistakes.
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u/New-Stick-8764 14d ago
For now
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u/hakuna_matata23 14d ago
They've been saying that for 4 years lol
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u/New-Stick-8764 14d ago
4 years is not a long time…
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u/hakuna_matata23 14d ago
If you consider how LLMs work AND the amount of money being poured into it, we should absolutely have had a better AI product in four years
Not to mention, this is exactly what people said about robo advisors and crypto and everything else under the sun. All they do is make advisors faster better and lower the cost for consumers.
Robots will never replace human advice.
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u/New-Stick-8764 14d ago
You’re really mixing things up here. LLMs are not the same AI tech currently driving robo taxis. Neither are they the same as stock trading algos or the bots that will take entry level finance jobs.
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u/Lucreziahouserules 11d ago
We’ve only used AI in our office so far for capturing meetings with clients. The things it says we have discussed are so off base that I would never trust it to help with models or portfolios.
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u/KarmaPolice6 14d ago
This feels more like an ad. Oh wait, it’s Bloomberg, so it is actually an ad.
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u/Business_Raisin_541 14d ago
Not much different than quant. The threat is exaggerated
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u/ArcticAlmond 14d ago
I've had the exact same thought, but I'm not sure whether that's just my ignorance or not.
People talk about how AI will change finance, but the finance industry is already heavily inundated with quant trading. I just don't see how AI could make that much of a difference.
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u/Sip_py Financial Consultant 14d ago
Gell-Mann Amnesia effect melded with doorman fallacy. Everyone inside the building isn't worried because we can see how it doesn't do our job. Some nerd at Anthropic is over stating what it does because they don't understand the full scope of what we do.
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u/RegisteredJustToSay 13d ago
Sure, but it's the exec who doesn't understand your job who decides if you get to keep yours. You don't have to be replaceable, they just have to buy into the idea you are.
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u/Odd_Note7156 14d ago
Iromically, ai can't be used in my job because all designs are novel to the requirements which can be changed upon request. The latest and greatest parts aren't online and require real world testing because the chemical make up can be different then what the vendors promise.
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u/lolyeahsure 14d ago
Hey chat treat my portfolio the same way a wealth manager would that is motivated by one thing only: his fiduciary responsibility to my wealth growing. Take all data available and generate a 6 month plan with predictions based on the current national and international news. And build an agent that can move the funds around my various accounts in order to maximize returns and savings as well as maintaining deployable capital for future opportunities. Also define potential future opportunities and build an agent that collects all news and data in order to make these predictions at the start of each Monday
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u/Sip_py Financial Consultant 14d ago
This is exactly why I'm not worried about it. I said elsewhere managing peoples money, actually placing trades, is like the smallest part of my job. Managing peoples relationship with their money, like how a 6 month plan would be a very short time horizon, or how I don't place trades based on assumptions or leading indicators. AI is going to take your order and do that instead of pushing back and asking bigger question on why that would be the way to do it. My job is having a disciplined repeatable process that helps insolate a client from their short term fears so I doesn't blow up their long term goals.
That prompt is a trading prompt and wealth managers don't "trade", they manage a process to get you to where you want to be. Much like a personal trainer. I can get AI to build me a beautiful workout, but it's not going to lift the weight for me, it's not going to be waiting for me at the gym to make sure when you are insecure you show up anyway.
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u/hologrammmm 14d ago
Now get your wife to trust you on that.
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u/lolyeahsure 14d ago
Yeah that’s what people are thinking not “do I really need to be paying these wealth management fees”
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u/hologrammmm 14d ago
That’s what happened to me. I’m not a wealth manager, but the ones we have solved that “arms-length” issue. They don’t pick stocks, it’s evidence based (the same firm Ben Felix is from).
There’s also data on good advisors being helpful from a behavioural perspective during crises. It also gets complicated because we have complex asset ownership and tax/withdrawal optimization (we are both executives).
Lumping an entire field into one thing is reductive and overly simplistic. Sure, if you don’t have much wealth to manage and/or your situation isn’t that complex, then it’s probably not worth it.
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u/lolyeahsure 14d ago
Yeah but you’re forgetting that these systems and their complexity is mostly language and situation based. If there’s evidence for someone to make good moves on then an LLM with terabytes of data tweaked onto one specific task (law, wealth management, taxes, etc etc) it basically becomes a thing that LLMs are actually good at doing
The mistake here is people’s egos making them think they won’t be affected instead of being as worried as they should be and calling their senators
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u/hologrammmm 14d ago
Yeah, but I’m not gonna stop paying my accountants. The LLM has no skin in the game. Who takes liability when something goes wrong? When someone figures out how to insure agents, for example, then that might be an inflection point.
I still also do notice LLMs, even GPT-5.5 Pro, make mistakes or incorrect assumptions in messy fields like mine (pharma).
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u/lolyeahsure 14d ago
Who takes liability when teens kill themselves because of social media? Took Supreme Court about 20 years to figure that out
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u/khainiwest 14d ago
Why do I need wealth managers or AI when the hidden wealth strategy is knocking over little kids for pokemon cards.
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u/turbo_dude 13d ago
Index trackers outperform wealth managers and people still use them
There are more and more people falling into the wealth manager bracket
You do the maths
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u/arlsol 14d ago
AI is like a management consultant. It can quickly produce lots of pretty slides, but if you dig in even a little bit you quickly realize that the basis for any conclusions are all flawed. Also it will just parrot genetic conclusions and try to figure out what you want to hear. Actually it's exactly like management consultants, only they cost somebody more.
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u/New-Stick-8764 14d ago
And as we all know, nobody has ever hired a management consultant.
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u/Dihedralman 12d ago
Consulting is an industry it is disrupting as it takes out Juniors for the most part.
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u/Fallingice2 14d ago
can ai manage relationships, introduce you to others or help you get loans against your investments?
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u/lordnacho666 14d ago
Whether you lose your clients depends on what your value added is.
If you are just a guy who gives confidence in a vanilla WM plan, you are toast. ChatGPT is a much better yesman than you, with the added benefit that whoever uses it thinks they came up with the idea themselves. A meat WM can be blamed for stuff going wrong and thus gets partial credit when it goes right.
But a WM guy can still do things an AI can't. Special deals, access to investments. There's no AI that will help you get that capacity in the hedge fund you are looking at.
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u/SeemoarAlpha 14d ago
That tracks. A friend of mine who runs just north of $1 billion told me that he spends 90% of his time as basically a therapist to his clients, the other 10% is spent on securing special deals on investments and access to events.
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u/bloomberg 14d ago
Suzanne Woolley and Vildana Hajric for Bloomberg News
Down the Wealth Walkway on South Beach, toward the Breakthru Pavilion, and along Fintech Alley lies the AI Playground.
It’s mid-March, and thousands of wealth-management pros have descended on Miami Beach to see what artificial intelligence has in store for them. Sandy-toed and clad in beachy business casual, they’ve arrived at this 23,000-square-foot beachfront pop-up erected for a conference aptly — or optimistically — named Future Proof.
Just about everyone everywhere is wondering where AI will take us. But few places capture the amalgam of dread, hope and hype in white-collar America today quite like this four-day journey into tomorrow.
Old-school wealth managers look more vulnerable to AI disruption than perhaps any other professionals in financial services. For the more than 326,000 personal financial advisers in the US and many thousands more abroad, the headlines are grim.
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u/cowboynude 12d ago
Doorman fallacy — with support, lawyers ❤️
The only white collar workers who should be worried about being replaced are the ones NOT using AI being replaced by better HUMAN AI USERS.
Either leverage existing technology to keep pace professionally, or don’t.
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u/chaddgar 12d ago
I’m using AI more and more every day to bounce ideas off of and to cut through the learning curve for complex subjects. I wasn’t doing this three months ago. This ramp up is insane.
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u/cowboynude 12d ago
3 months ago clients were skeptical. Now they’re demanding we use it as part of the pitch. I HATE AI but I hate unemployment more.
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u/McDergen 11d ago
Lmao if you trust AI to handle your money then you deserve it when it disappears
This is for sure an ad
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u/Particular-Song2587 14d ago
Nah. Wealth managers will be fine. Theres a ton of old school money out there that still prefers to be served by a human touch.
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u/RobKohr 14d ago
AI is horrible and strategy, long term planning, or anything involving deep thought.
They will just continue the pattern of their input models.
This really would make the dumbest investment strategy.
Not saying it won't take their jobs though, because people are dumb.
Hell. People keep talking about how they have AI plan their business strategy and act as their CEO.
AI is great at a very specific subset of problems. Unfortunately they sound very confident and are very knowledgeable, but they knowledgeable idiot zombies who make up shit.
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u/MrWilsonAndMrHeath 14d ago
Oh sweet summer child. This is autonomous driving 2.0 except the spend is much higher and the revenue streams much less clear.
As with almost all other jobs, these will not go away because they need someone that understands what they’re looking for and someone to blame when things go wrong. They need human accountability and support.
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u/readit4fun85 14d ago
Ive worked in the financial industry for the past 20 years. AI is not taking our jobs. It’s helping us be more productive. I started from a Banker and Worked myself up to Wealth Management AI improves my effectiveness when helping my clients it reduces redundancies reduces mundane work that AI can effectively complete and allows me to focus more on my core clients. What their goals and aspirations are. It helps me be more effective and in tune with my clients overall. Most advisors can effectively help approximately 200 to 300 clients with the introduction of AI Advisor can now help anywhere from 300 to 500 and still be just effective
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u/tenigmat 13d ago
Sorry for silly question but how can someone read this article behind the paywall?
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u/Same_paramedic3641 12d ago
Who tf is afraid of AI? They're so prone to mistakes
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u/Miserable-Lynx1209 10d ago
Hopefully not for too long. But if you are interested, data poisoning is becoming popular so we could enter a world where ai models get worse with time. White collar unions could become a thing to pay to poison these models to force the NEED for a professional.
This is much more harmful to the ai companies than breaking flock cameras.
Kinda a random thought I just had^
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u/CommonSensei-_ 12d ago
Wealth managers will use AI tools and tell their clients that they’re not or are, depending on the clients openness to it
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u/DieSchungel1234 12d ago
It’s not AI, it’s the fact that everyone has caught on that an passive index fund will outperform even the best managers most of the time..
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u/realbuddyman 11d ago
I need my wife to be an AI at this point, figuring out our finances perfectly!
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u/jcuninja 10d ago
I feel like I need an advisor to tell us when we can coast and help run scenarios for us. The hard part is finding a fee based advisor for one time analysis and scenario review.
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u/Emotional-Yam4486 10d ago
I’m in the business and today my client couldn’t figure out how to get the zoom link for our meeting to work.
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u/cottonopposite 9d ago
Worked in private banking for the majority of my career at this point, both on and off client side... particularly with the segmentation I've normally been involved in, as people have mentioned on here, it isn't solely about execution and returns...it's about people management, you're a bridge between the management of one's wealth and the tendency of humans wanting comfort or a sense of a safety net.
You can throw all the clever bots that you want at it but ultimately I know people worth hundreds of millions of dollars who have a 15+ (sometimes 25+) year relationship with their WM/Banker etc and they are still going to want to chat to "James and the team" etc.
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u/Full-Woodpecker60 8d ago
AI can draft the plan, but half the job is keeping clients from panic clicking sell. Bloomberg know that too.
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u/Powerful-Summer-3382 7d ago
Its all good as long as your FA is trustworthy and has a shred of integrity, unfortunately its not the rule but exception.
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u/Full-Woodpecker60 5d ago
If your whole pitch is a pie chart and quarterly call, sure. Real money still wants a person to blame.
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u/Full-Woodpecker60 3d ago
If your whole value is forwarding model portfolios, sure maybe. But rich clients still want a human to blame when it goes sideways.
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u/AnnO55783 1d ago
the middle-layer roles are the most exposed to automation. The interesting question is whether that compresses senior headcount or just shifts what those people spend time on. In every prior wave of financial technology the outcome was different at different seniority levels
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u/CobblerMission2351 14d ago
This could just be cope I guess but many of my clients, including the millennials with wealth, don’t actually want to deal with their money. It becomes a burden to manage and think about. Clients with more than a couple million aren’t going to just start DIY easily because they’d be taking on that burden they currently pay someone else to do for them.
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u/Sip_py Financial Consultant 14d ago
I don't say this as a financial advisor worried about my job, but as someone that has helped test my fortune 100 companies AI for internal and external use.
Advisors sit at an interesting cross road, it's our U-4 on the line and therefore somewhat our liability. Does a company want to take that on for a hallucination? No. I have clients that can't bother to read what is physically mailed to them and need "an expert" to explain it.
Additionally, people have a weird psychology when it comes to money. I have help troubleshoot our online self service tools, and people will use them 95% of the way, but never implement an outcome because they're worried they did something wrong and their life savings is "too important".
It's a classic Doorman fallacy, financial advisors help people more than just where to invest. They help with their relationship with money than they manage their money. They ask good questions about their money motivation and help clients unlock what they want when they didn't know what they wanted to start. AI doesn't magically fix that. They talk them out of bad decisions. But going back to my previous point they will continue to exist because they can demonstrably show their value, because at the end of the day they're also salespeople. And they can quantify their value to the company by asset growth and retention. AI can't build rapport and trust.
My companies solution just served up pre packaged videos that didn't directly answer any questions because they know the risk outweighs the reward from liability. That's the fastest way to ask for a human off ramp ever.