AdviceTech 2026: Six Shifts Every Advice Firm Should Plan For

2025 was the year everyone tried implementing AI.

Most advice firms have experimented somewhere: meeting summaries, email drafts, a bit of automation here and there. Global research lines up with what we see on the ground – around 80% of organisations are piloting generative AI, but only a small minority are seeing real, measurable business impact. (MLQ)

2026 will be different.

The gap between firms that are “playing with” technology and firms that run on it is about to widen. Clients will feel it. Staff will feel it. Licensees and regulators will feel it.

Below are six shifts we think matter most for advice and AdviceTech in 2026, plus what they actually mean for your practice.

1. AI moves from experiments to embedded workflows

Most firms now have AI somewhere in the building. The issue is depth, not presence.

So far, AI has lived at the edges:
– tidier emails
– quick meeting summaries
– “chat with a PDF” tools

Useful, but not transformational.

In 2026, the real shift is AI moving into core advice workflows:

• review prep: pulling positions, changes and key talking points ahead of a meeting
• file notes and advice records: drafting in your house style, not a blob of text
• paraplanner handoffs: structured briefs, not free‑form emails
• ongoing monitoring: scanning your client book for risks and opportunities

Global surveys echo this: AI tools are commonplace, but most organisations still haven’t embedded them deeply enough into processes to see material benefits. (McKinsey & Company)

What this means for advice firms

• Stop asking “where can we try AI?” and start asking “which workflows should AI live inside?”
• Pick one high‑value flow (for example, file notes + paraplanner requests) and redesign it properly with AI at the centre, not bolted on.

2. Hybrid advice becomes the default, not the exception

“Hybrid advice” (human adviser plus digital and AI ) has been on PowerPoint slides for years. It is now becoming the working reality.

Wealth and advice research points in the same direction: the future model blends robo‑style automation with human judgement, giving clients the convenience of digital and the reassurance of a real person. (Forbes)

Clients are getting used to this in other parts of their financial lives. They expect:

• self‑service for simple tasks and updates
• smart nudges and education when something changes
• real human help when decisions are complex or emotional

Firms that only offer “all‑human” or “all‑digital” will increasingly feel incomplete.

What this means for advice firms

• Map your client journeys and mark clearly: where must a human be involved, and where is digital or AI actually better?
• Choose tools that support “both/and”: digital intake, education and nudging, with smooth handoff into adviser‑led conversations.

3. Personalisation and insight become the baseline

Personalisation has always been part of good advice. What changes in 2026 is the level clients come to expect.

AI‑driven personalisation is now a top trend in wealth management globally: firms are using data and machine learning to tailor portfolios, communications and recommendations to individual goals and behaviours. (Forbes)

For advice practices, the real opportunity is less about flashy dashboards and more about better questions:

• Which clients are drifting off track against their goals?
• Who is under‑insured or over‑concentrated?
• Who has unaddressed life events showing up in your CRM?
• Who hasn’t had a proper review in too long?

AI can help find those patterns. Human advisers still do the work of prioritising and responding.

What this means for advice firms

• Decide what “personalised” actually means for you: more tailored reports, more targeted outreach, or more proactive reviews – and focus on that.
• Start with the data you already have. Use it to trigger specific actions (for example, a quarterly list of “clients who need attention now”) rather than trying to build everything at once.

4. AI risk and “shadow AI” move from IT issues to licence issues

In 2024 and 2025, most AI risk conversations lived with IT and security. That is changing fast.

Studies now show that around half of employees use unapproved AI tools at work, and many say they would keep doing so even if those tools were banned. (SecurityWeek) IBM’s breach data adds a harder edge: roughly 13% of organisations report AI‑related security incidents, and a significant share of AI‑related breaches are tied to unauthorised tools. (smefinanceforum.org)

In advice, this is not just an IT concern. It is a licence and client‑trust concern.

Every time client information is pasted into a consumer chatbot or “free” AI site, you may be:

• transferring personal data overseas
• creating records you don’t control or log
• stepping outside your own privacy and outsourcing policies

Our own analysis of advice firms’ AI usage sees this pattern already emerging: good people filling process gaps with whatever tool is in front of them.

What this means for advice firms

• Assume shadow AI is already happening in your practice. Go and find it without blame.
• Bring AI under your existing risk and advice frameworks: treat it like any other significant outsourced service with rules, owners and monitoring.

5. From tool sprawl to integrated advice platforms

The last decade of AdviceTech was mostly about “point solutions”:
fact‑find tools here, scheduling tools there, portfolio systems somewhere else.

Many firms now sit on a fragile web of logins, spreadsheets and manual glue. The data is there; it just doesn’t flow.

Industry work from Cerulli and others shows that practices identified as “tech‑heavy” (where tech is properly integrated) grow faster and operate more efficiently than those with scattered tools. (InvestmentNews)

AI will only amplify this divide. If your client data is fragmented, your AI will be shallow or risky. If your data is coherent, your AI can become a genuine layer of intelligence over the practice.

What this means for advice firms

• Audit your stack honestly: how many systems, how many data stores, and how much re‑keying? That’s your “integration tax”.
• For new tech decisions, put integration and data flow ahead of shiny features. Ask “how will this plug into our core platform and records?” before “what does the demo look like?”

6. Change management becomes the competitive edge

The hardest part of technology is not choosing tools. It is getting humans to change how they work.

Global research on AI value is blunt: after years of investment, only about one quarter of companies have built the capabilities needed to capture value at scale. The rest struggle mainly with skills, processes and change, not with model quality. (BCG Global)

In wealth and advice specifically, Cerulli finds that advisers’ top tech challenges are:
– compliance restrictions that limit how tools can be used (73%)
– lack of integration between systems (71%)
– insufficient time to learn and implement new tech (70%+). (Cerulli Associates)

None of those are about whether the software “works”. They are about adoption.

In 2026, the real advantage will go to firms that treat implementation as seriously as they treat selection. They will have:

• named owners for each change
• clear training, not just a launch webinar
• time protected for staff to learn
• specific measures for success (cycle time, error rates, capacity, client satisfaction)

What this means for advice firms

• Treat each major tech move as a change project, not just a procurement decision. If you cannot name the process that will change and who owns that change, pause.
• Go narrow and deep: it is better to fully embed one or two AI‑enabled workflows than to “half‑adopt” five tools that never change outcomes.

If you only do three things in Q1 2026…

Trends are only useful if they change what you do next quarter.

Here are three practical moves:

1. Pick one workflow and rebuild it with AI on purpose
   File notes and paraplanner briefs, or review‑pack generation, are usually the best candidates. Define what “better” means in numbers (time, consistency, error rate) and track it.
2. Bring AI use into the open and under governance
   Ask advisers, paraplanners and client service staff what they are really using today. Set a few clear red lines (data that must never touch public tools) and green lanes (approved, governed options).
3. Make someone clearly responsible for AI adoption
   This person’s job is not to buy more tools. Their job is to make sure workflows, training and measurement actually change.

If you do those three things, you will already be in a different place to most firms by the end of 2026: less noise, more value, and a tech stack that actually supports the advice you want to deliver.

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