Wealthy investors embrace AI for their finances but 7 in 10 are loyal to their adviser
High-net-worth (HNW) Australians have enthusiastically adopted artificial intelligence to help manage their money, but the vast majority still want a human adviser firmly in the loop, according to new research released yesterday by investment platform Praemium, conducted with specialist research consultancy CoreData.
The study of HNW investors who work with a financial adviser found that around 80% have already used AI for financial tasks – from general financial education (50%) and comparing investment strategies (46%) to sense-checking the advice they receive from their own adviser (35%).
Yet that rising self-direction has not translated into a desire to go it alone. Asked whether they would manage their portfolio themselves if given access to the exact same tools their adviser uses, just 29% said yes. Roughly seven in ten would still prefer to keep their adviser’s guidance.
The finding runs counter to the widely held view that AI and self-service tools will erode demand for financial advice. Instead, the research suggests AI is reshaping what clients expect from the relationship rather than replacing it: 86% of HNW investors said the human adviser–client relationship will remain important even in an AI-enabled future, and most favour a “human advice with AI support” model over full automation.
“The story here isn’t AI versus advisers — it’s AI with advisers,” said Denis Orrock, Chief Strategy Officer at Praemium. “Clients are using these tools to become more informed and more engaged, and they’re arriving with higher expectations of what their adviser should deliver. That’s an opportunity, not a threat — but it does raise the bar. The role of a platform is to give advisers the tools and efficiencies to meet that expectation, rather than leaving them to compete with technology their clients are already using.”
Personalisation — not performance — is the real loyalty test
The more HNW investors use AI to test ideas, compare strategies and validate adviser recommendations, the more the value of advice shifts toward what technology cannot provide on its own: context, judgement and a complete view of wealth. The strongest signal in the research is that the service clients value most is an adviser who understands “how my finances fit into my whole life picture” (47%) — ahead of above-average investment returns as a stand-alone measure of value.
That matters because clients are not using AI simply to bypass advice. They are using it to become more informed participants in the relationship. Nine in ten said their adviser helps build their financial literacy and 88% said their adviser keeps them accountable to their goals. The implication is clear: AI may help clients ask better questions, but the adviser remains the person who turns information into guidance, connects investment decisions to broader wealth objectives, and provides the coaching and education clients continue to value.
The opportunity: free advisers to do more of what clients value
If AI is making clients more informed, the opportunity is not to automate the adviser relationship but to give advisers more capacity to deepen it. HNW clients remain most comfortable with AI where it supports human judgement, and continue to see complex portfolio management (65%), intergenerational wealth transfer (60%) and investment selection (59%) as work that still requires an adviser. The task for the AI era is therefore clear: remove the friction that keeps advisers buried in reporting, administration and manual processes, so they can spend more time providing the whole-of-wealth guidance, education and accountability clients value most.
“The advisers who thrive won’t be the ones doing everything themselves. They’ll be the ones who use technology to remove the work that doesn’t require human judgement, so they can spend more time on the personalised engagement clients actually value,” said Orrock. “That is where platforms have an important role to play. By giving advisers whole-of-wealth visibility, stronger reporting and more efficient workflows, technology can help surface a client’s full financial picture faster and create more time for the higher-value conversations HNW clients are asking for.”
