One of my clients recently told me he’d spent six months “looking into automation” without automating a single thing. He’d sat through demos, read white papers, spoken to vendors, and come away more confused than when he started. Sound familiar?
The problem is rarely a shortage of options. It’s a shortage of sequence. Most firms approach automation by asking “what tools should we buy?” when the better question is “what problem do I actually need to solve, and what’s the smallest thing I can change today to make progress?” Getting that sequence right is the difference between a firm that runs meaningfully more efficiently twelve months from now and one that’s still in the evaluation phase.
Here’s how I’d approach it.
Start by mapping what your people actually do
Before you touch a tool or speak to a vendor, spend a week writing down every repeating task that happens in your firm. Not the big strategic processes, but the granular ones: client meeting follow-ups, annual review reminders, data entry from one system into another, chasing missing documents, generating suitability letter drafts.
Ask your advisers and paraplanners to keep a rough log for five working days. You’re looking for tasks that have three characteristics: they happen repeatedly, they follow a predictable pattern, and they don’t require genuine professional judgement on every instance.
The FCA has acknowledged that infrequent, ad hoc data requests are a real operational burden for firms, making it difficult to plan and allocate resource[1]. That same logic applies internally. The repeating work that you can’t plan around is exactly where automation earns its keep.
You’ll likely find that most of the low-hanging fruit falls into three categories: meeting administration, document handling, and chasing workflows. That’s where to start.
Decide whether you need Level 1, Level 2, or Level 3
Once you have your list, resist the urge to jump straight to infrastructure. Most firms overestimate the complexity of what they need.
Level 1 (education): The fix already exists inside a tool you already pay for. A prompt template in your existing AI assistant, a meeting summary feature in your video conferencing platform, a report scheduled inside your CRM. Free or nearly free. Available today. A significant proportion of what advice firms think requires a build is actually sitting unused inside existing software licences.
Level 2 (integration): Two or three tools that need to talk to each other. A new client completes an onboarding form and the data flows automatically into your back-office system, triggering a task in your CRM and sending a welcome email. This is configuration work, not engineering. Platforms like Make or Power Automate handle this well. Typically days to weeks, and a few hundred to a few thousand pounds.
Level 3 (custom build): Real engineering. Bespoke orchestration, complex logic, custom pipelines. Four to twelve weeks. Scoped carefully. Only warranted when the problem genuinely can’t be solved at Level 1 or 2.
The discipline is to always try to solve at Level 1 first. Most firms that come to me thinking they need a custom build actually need a prompt and a workflow, not a development project.
Pick your first automation carefully
Don’t automate the most complex process first. Automate the most painful, repeating one that has the least regulatory sensitivity. This gives you a fast win, builds internal confidence, and lets you learn how your team responds to changed workflows before the stakes are high.
Meeting notes and follow-up tasks are a strong first candidate for most advice firms. Tools that record, transcribe, and summarise adviser meetings free up time that goes directly back into client-facing conversation. Intelliflo’s research found that firms using technology to automate meeting recording and follow-up communications allowed advisers to focus on conversation quality and listening, with one firm reporting a 20% increase in average clients per adviser as a result[2].
That’s a meaningful number, and it comes from a change that requires no custom engineering.
The question isn’t whether automation is right for your firm. It’s whether you’re starting with the right problem.
Build your governance framework before you scale
This is the step most firms skip, and it’s the one that causes problems later.
A governance framework for automation doesn’t need to be a lengthy document. It needs to answer four questions clearly:
Who owns each automated workflow? Every automation should have a named person responsible for it, not a team or a role in the abstract. That person is accountable for checking it continues to work correctly and that its outputs are reviewed before they reach a client.
What requires human sign-off before output leaves the firm? AI and automation tools can draft suitability letters, generate reports, and compose client communications. None of those outputs should go to a client without a qualified person reviewing and approving them. This is not optional in a regulated context. The system drafts; the adviser signs off.
How do you know if something has gone wrong? Build a simple monitoring step into every workflow. For a document generation workflow, that might mean spot-checking ten outputs a month. For a data-entry automation, it means a weekly reconciliation. The FCA’s focus on data integrity and the Consumer Duty requirement for firms to take responsibility for client outcomes both point in the same direction: you remain responsible for what your systems produce[1].
What happens if a tool fails or changes? Vendor instability is a real risk at the application layer of the AI market right now. Tools that advice firms have built workflows around can pivot, raise prices, or be acquired with little warning. Build each automation so that the process can revert to a manual fallback within a day, and document that fallback clearly.
What to do in the first thirty days
This is a practical starting point, not an exhaustive project plan.
First, map your repeating work. Ask every member of staff to log repeating tasks for one week. Don’t filter or judge at this stage. Collect everything.
Second, sort by frequency and sensitivity. The highest-frequency, lowest-sensitivity tasks are your starting point. Tasks that touch client advice, suitability, or regulated recommendations need more careful design and should not be in scope for your first automation.
Third, check your existing tools. Before evaluating anything new, go through the tools you already pay for and find out what they already do. Most practice management systems, including Intelliflo, have automation and workflow features that go unused[2]. Most Microsoft 365 licences include Power Automate. Level 1 solutions are often sitting in your existing stack.
Fourth, run a single pilot. Choose one workflow, automate it at the appropriate level, and run it for four weeks. Measure what changes: time saved, error rate, adviser feedback. Use that data to inform what comes next.
Fifth, document your governance decisions. Before you switch the pilot live, write down who owns it, what the human review step is, and what the fallback looks like. A page is enough. Do this from the start and it becomes habit.
What to avoid
A few patterns I see regularly that slow firms down or create risk:
Automating before you understand the process. If you can’t describe a workflow in plain English, you can’t automate it safely. Automation doesn’t fix a broken process. It runs a broken process faster.
Treating AI outputs as final. AI tools can draft suitability letters, meeting summaries, and client communications. They can also be wrong, in ways that are plausible enough to pass a quick read. In a regulated context, AI-generated outputs require human review before they are used in client-facing documents or decisions. There is no shortcut here.
Buying a platform and then looking for problems to solve. The right sequence is always: identify the problem, then find the tool. Doing it in reverse leads to shelfware.
Scaling before the pilot is stable. Run one automation well before you run ten poorly. The confidence that comes from a working pilot is worth more than the coverage that comes from a rushed rollout.
The longer view
Automation in a regulated advice firm is not a one-time project. It’s an ongoing discipline: mapping work, identifying friction, testing tools at the appropriate level, reviewing outputs, and updating governance as workflows change.
The firms that do this well don’t do it because they love technology. They do it because it lets their advisers spend more time on the work that actually requires an adviser, and because a well-run automation programme is a competitive advantage that’s hard to replicate quickly.
If you want to think through what this looks like for your specific firm, a discovery call with Cordrey Consulting is a good place to start.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute regulated financial advice or a compliance opinion. Consult a qualified compliance professional for advice specific to your firm.
Sources
[1] FCA, ‘PS26/8: Retail banking business models data’, Financial Conduct Authority, 30 May 2026. Available at: https://www.fca.org.uk/publications/policy-statements/ps26-8-retail-banking-business-models-data
[2] Intelliflo, ‘Streamlining processes: how Atkins Bland is making the most of Intelliflo Office’, Intelliflo Insights, 23 May 2026. Available at: https://www.intelliflo.com/insights/success-stories/streamlining-processes-how-atkins-bland-is-making-the-most-of-intelliflo-office