Guest post by Alasdair Walker CFP, Managing Director, Optimum Path Financial Planning and co-host of NextWealth’s AI Lab

Over the past year, I’ve had the privilege of hosting the NextWealth AI Lab alongside Heather Hopkins and Chanelle Paynter. AI Lab is a community where financial planners explore use cases for AI.

After a year of listening and telling stories about tech, implementation, and the pros and cons of different approaches, a few lessons stand out. I shared these lessons at the recent CISI financial planning conference with a standing-room-only audience. To give a wider audience access to this learning, Heather asked me to write them up in a blog post.

What Do We Mean by AI?

AI covers everything from rules-based “classic AI” to generative models such as ChatGPT and Copilot. The most exciting developments this year have been attempts to combine the two, resulting in “agent AI” and “research AI”, both are now available in the paid tiers of all the major AI providers.

The aim isn’t to become a technologist but to understand enough to use these tools safely and effectively.

A Surprising Insight – Adoption in Financial Services is Slow

Compared with law and accountancy, our sector has been slower to adopt AI. Other professions already use it for research, document automation and tax analysis. In financial advice, the conversation often starts with: Is it compliant? and Can we trust the output?

These are valid questions, but waiting for perfect answers risks us getting left behind.

Three Things Every Firm Should Know

1. Your team is already using AI. Tools like Copilot and ChatGPT are finding their way into day-to-day work.
2. You need an AI policy. If you don’t have one, go write one now. We wrote ours with ChatGPT!
3. Whatever you do, don’t try and ban AI usage. Encourage safe and thoughtful experimentation with tools that will make your business run more quickly and efficiently.

What Works in Practice

At AI Lab, presenters aren’t allowed to do use case presentations about AI for meeting notes, because we assume that has already been done (if you haven’t started your AI journey yet, this is the perfect place to start).

I shared two stories from opposite ends of the business size spectrum

• A solo practitioner self-described as “non-techy” used ChatGPT, Google Sheets and email automations to build a virtual PA which booked appointments directly with clients, saving hours each week.
• A large advice firm used an AI-powered SMS chatbot to re-engage unresponsive leads. Six percent of those “lost” prospects became clients. The real insight here was how willing people are to share deep financial data and opinions with a bot.

These aren’t futuristic use cases or sales pitches for a particular solution. Practitioners and experts share practical and business-tested examples of AI making a measurable difference.

How We’re Using It at Optimum Path

At Optimum Path, AI already supports our advice process. Using Copilot GPT-5, we can prepare for meetings by summarising recent client interactions and highlighting key concerns. Copilot often doesn’t feel like it’s working very well, but since GPT-5 was added, it occasionally feels like you’re working with magic.

We’re also doing as much as we can with our meeting notes – we have used Fireflies to develop custom “AI applications” (a fancy term for automated prompts) which allow us to, amongst other things:

• Produce an objective view on whether clients expressed potential vulnerable circumstances in meetings
• Assess the financial planner’s performance in meetings – ability to answer questions thoroughly, assessment of client understanding and trust, even whether the planner interrupted the client and how often.
• Produce compliance-approved ‘ongoing financial planning report’ emails to send to clients immediately following our meetings, delivering high-value outcomes at the best possible time.

These developments are relatively modest, and certainly not perfect, but they are producing meaningful business improvements.

Build or Buy?

Firms face a choice:

• Build in-house using tools like ChatGPT, Fireflies and Zapier – lower cost but higher complexity. Perfect for firms with ‘techy’ team members who like a challenge
• Buy turnkey solutions such as Saturn, AdvisoryAI or Aveni (and too many others to provide a full list!) – faster to deploy but more expensive and tied to a developer’s roadmap.

Either can work; the right option depends on resources and strategy.

The Real Challenges

The biggest barrier isn’t technology — it’s people. We have heard many stories at AI lab of members buying the tech and assuming that was the job done. Regardless of the size of firm, your team need training, and the change needs to be managed. Expect to spend £5 on training and change management for every £1 on tech.

And beware of “shiny thing syndrome”. Every project should deliver a clear return: better service, measurable efficiency or improved compliance.

Lastly, there is still a sizeable “implementation gap” – AI has become fantastic at getting us 80% of the way there, but the last 20% can feel like the most work.

I shared the example of the presentation I was giving:

• I worked with Claude to develop a fantastic, well-formatted slide deck that saved me hours of writing and design time. I then asked Claude to generate a Powerpoint file…no can do!
• Claude offered to produce a plain text file of all the slides, but I searched the web and found I could ask it to create “VBA” code to let Powerpoint generate the slides automatically – result!
• …reality then set in and after five or six failed attempts, I gave up and pasted the plain text into the slides, re-formatting them myself manually (with a little help from Copilot).

Dangers we and our clients face

AI brings new threats: deepfakes, voice cloning, hyper-personalised phishing and high energy costs. Awareness and governance are essential.

I shared the following “telephone call” and “Teams video” clips. Both were 100% AI-generated based on 2 minutes of recorded audio and video respectively. I never said the words in the clips. Whilst the output is definitely within the “uncanny valley”, we have to assume that it would be convincing enough to risk fooling a client.

I suggested that, whilst we should all already be confirming that we are speaking to our clients with personal data known to them, we should consider asking clients to do the same with us.

We stand between our clients and AI-generated scams, and have to take that responsibility seriously.

Looking forwards

Looking ahead, expect to see predictive advice tools, behavioural finance chatbots and even AI avatars supporting client education.

One of our very own AI Lab members, Helena Wardle, made the news in recent weeks after her AI-driven advice chatbot passed the Diploma in Regulated Financial Planning with better marks than many humans.

To illustrate that point, I had spent twenty minutes with Claude research, generating a case study answer to the CISI CFP case study, and I reckoned it wasn’t far off passing that either.

An Action Plan for Advisers

I finished the presentation with a suggested action plan if you didn’t know where to start. You might have already completed some of these, which is fantastic.

1. Write an AI usage policy, or check it’s current if it’s more than a year old. Use your favourite chatbot to help with this, they’re great at it.
2. Appoint an AI advocate or champion within your business. It doesn’t need to be you!
3. Provide staff training on security and good practice. I shouted out both Nextgen Planners and “AI for Non-Techies” as examples of fantastic training.
4. Start small, learn quickly, and iterate. Let your team develop their own ways of working in a sandbox environment.
5. Prioritise progress over perfection. Don’t wait for the perfect out-of-the-box solution to solve all your tech problems.
6. Join communities of other practitioners and share experiences and best practices. AI Lab is a great example, and we have a handful of spots available this year.

I finished with the following statement:

“AI won’t replace financial planners. But planners using AI will replace planners who don’t”.

AI is already reshaping professional services – I think it pays to be part of that disruption, rather than waiting to be disrupted by it.

Alasdair Walker CFP, Managing Director, Optimum Path Financial Planning and co-host of NextWealth’s AI Lab

To read more about the AI Lab or join today, head over here.