Can financial advisers use AI?

For file notes, drafting correspondence and summarising documents, with an adviser verifying and owning the output. Not for anything that resembles advice itself, and not by pasting client financial information into public consumer tools where it leaves your governance entirely.

The genuinely useful applications are administrative rather than analytical, which is where the time actually goes in an advice practice. Turning a recorded meeting into a structured file note. Drafting the client letter explaining a recommendation the adviser has already made. Summarising a long product disclosure statement to orient yourself before reading the parts that matter. Each saves real minutes on work that happens constantly and produces something a person then makes correct.

The line worth holding is between assisting and advising. These tools generate confident, plausible text and will occasionally state something that is simply wrong, including product features, thresholds and rules that sound right. In a licensed environment that is not a minor quality issue: the adviser is responsible for the recommendation and for the accuracy of what reaches the client. Output is a draft, always, and the verification is the professional work rather than an optional step.

Governance is where to start rather than finish. Give people a sanctioned tool operating under business terms inside your own environment, so the useful thing has an approved home and client data is not leaving. Write three sentences on what may never be pasted anywhere. Check your licensee's position before adopting anything. And tidy document permissions first if you deploy something that answers from your own files, since it will surface whatever your access control already allows. If you want it set up with the guardrails first, call 1800 456 567.