According to Intelliflo, 87% of financial advisers now use AI for admin such as note-taking, and 44% for report writing[1]. That sounds like a lot until you look at what it describes: AI transcribing and summarising, while the slow, compliance-heavy work that limits how many clients an adviser can serve is mostly untouched.

Starting with note-taking is sensible. It’s low-risk, useful straight away and most firms can set it up in a day. It just isn’t where most of the time goes.

Where the admin burden sits

Most advice-firm admin comes from systems that don’t talk to each other, not from a lack of AI inside any one of them. Intelliflo found 60.7% of advice firms use five or more separate systems[1].

An adviser taking a client through a review touches the back office, the cashflow modelling tool, the client portal, the document store, and usually a shared drive or inbox as well. Intelliflo’s research puts the admin that shouldn’t need an adviser at 40 hours per 100 clients[2], about 24 minutes per client per review, before any advice is given.

AI tools that sit inside one of those systems help within that system. The bigger gains come from connecting them.

Four questions to ask before choosing a tool

Plenty of AI tools weren’t built for regulated professional services. Generic productivity tools don’t understand advice workflows, suitability obligations or the audit requirements your firm works under[3]. Before choosing anything, ask four things.

Where does the data go? Client data in an AI tool is personal data under UK GDPR. You need to know whether it leaves the jurisdiction, who processes it and whether the vendor’s data processing agreement is adequate. A tool that sends fact-find data to an offshore model without a proper DPA is a problem waiting to happen. (Our AI vendor due diligence checklist goes through the rest.)

What’s the human review step? No AI tool should produce a suitability letter, report or recommendation that reaches a client without a qualified adviser reading and approving it. The AI drafts and the adviser signs off. Be wary of any tool that suggests the adviser can skip that.

Can you show your working? Under Consumer Duty you have to be able to show that client outcomes are good. If AI contributes to a recommendation or communication, you need a record of how it contributed and who reviewed it. “The AI did it” isn’t a position your compliance team can defend.

Is it built in or bolted on? Generic tools used on their own mean copying and pasting between systems, which introduces errors and leaves audit trails that don’t join up[3]. AI built into your existing platform is generally easier to trace, though it limits your flexibility.

Four places AI pays off in an advice firm

Meeting transcription and summaries

Transcription tools that turn a client meeting into a structured summary cut the gap between meeting and file note from hours to minutes. The risk is low and the review step is obvious: the adviser reads the summary before it goes on file.

Accuracy matters more here than in most industries, though. A misheard figure or a missed instruction can have real consequences, so the review isn’t optional even for this.

Report and suitability letter drafting

Report drafting is where the time savings are largest and the compliance stakes are highest. AI-drafted suitability letters need careful set-up (what the tool knows about the client, what the template allows) and a thorough adviser review before they go anywhere. The AI drafts and the adviser owns the result.

Intelliflo’s embedded AI is one example of tooling built for this, working from the data already in the platform. Generic tools like ChatGPT, used without a connection to your client data, are more likely to make things up and need more checking. We’ve written up how to automate suitability report drafting in more detail.

Client onboarding and KYC

Digital onboarding takes a lot of the re-keying and chasing out of KYC. How much you gain depends on whether your process is already digital or still on paper, and whether your tool connects to identity verification services such as LexisNexis or Socure[4].

This is where tool choice is most tied to your compliance and AML obligations. An AI-assisted KYC process is only as reliable as its data sources and the human review that closes it off.

Connecting your systems

Most firms haven’t touched this yet, and it’s where the gains add up. Connecting your back office to your CRM, document store and client communications through an automation platform such as n8n, Make or Zapier means a trigger in one system can start a process across all of them without anyone re-keying data.

The firms that get the most from AI tend to be the ones whose systems pass information to each other, not the ones with the best single tool.

For example, a review reminder in the back office can create a task, pull the relevant documents and draft a client message, with a person approving each step before it goes ahead. That’s a standard integration, not a research project.

Where agentic AI fits

The industry is moving from single AI features towards platforms that run multi-step workflows across applications, usually called agentic AI. Digital Applied reports that 75% of businesses say they’re interested, but only 11 to 17% have deployed it, and that 40% of agentic AI projects are cancelled before they ship, usually because of integration complexity rather than a shortage of good tools[5].

For an advice firm, that argues for starting with simpler integrations, proving they work and building from there. Committing to a full agentic platform before basic integration works is how firms end up in the 40%.

Where to start

Find out where advisers’ time goes. An honest conversation with two or three advisers about a typical review cycle will tell you where AI would help.

Look at how many systems you run. With five or more, the question isn’t which AI tool to add. It’s whether those systems can talk to each other, and whether a new tool will connect to them or sit on its own.

Start with one frequent, lower-risk task. Meeting transcription and file notes suit most firms. Get that working with a clear review process before moving on to suitability letters.

Put every tool through the four questions. Data residency, human review, audit trail and integration. A tool that fails any of them isn’t suitable for a regulated firm, however good the demo looks.

Build governance in from the start. A record of AI-assisted decisions and a documented human oversight process are part of the implementation, not an extra to add later.

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] Intelliflo (2026) ‘Why financial advisers spend more time on admin than advice’, Intelliflo Insights. Available at: https://www.intelliflo.com/insights/thought-leadership/why-financial-advisers-spend-more-time-on-admin-than-advice

[2] Intelliflo (2026) ‘How advice platform tools can give advisers their time back’, Intelliflo Insights. Available at: https://www.intelliflo.com/insights/thought-leadership/how-advice-platform-tools-can-give-advisers-their-time-back

[3] Intelliflo (2026) ‘Why embedded AI is changing the advice journey’, Intelliflo Insights. Available at: https://www.intelliflo.com/insights/thought-leadership/why-embedded-ai-is-changing-the-advice-journey

[4] LexisNexis Risk Solutions / Socure, data enrichment and identity verification tools for regulated financial services, referenced as examples of identity verification infrastructure available to UK-regulated firms.

[5] Digital Applied (2026) ‘Why Agentic AI Projects Get Canceled (and How to Ship)’. Available at: https://www.digitalapplied.com/blog/agentic-ai-project-cancellations-gartner-40-percent-2026