Written By Travis Hornsby, CFA®, CFP®
Updated on July 31, 2025
Artificial intelligence is baked into almost everything we do. I’ll be the first to admit it: I use ChatGPT for everything from searching for information to looking up details I’d normally ask a professional about, including lawyers, doctors, and yes, even financial planners.
Will all white-collar workers be replaced by AI in the future? Or will there still be a place for humans in financial planning?
AI may be powerful, but money decisions aren’t just about math — they’re about motivation, emotion and accountability. Let’s look at why those human elements still matter, how AI fits in, and what the future of AI in financial planning might be.
AI can’t reach the emotions behind your financial decisions
You can have an AI boyfriend or girlfriend, but an AI financial planner only delivers data. It’ll give you some of the correct technical answers without actually touching the human side of money — the part that actually matters.
For example, suppose AI flags that you’re not maxing out your 401(k). Without anyone holding you accountable to your goals, nothing changes. Your plan stalls, and so does your wealth.
A big reason that 401(k) increase never happens is because you’re overwhelmed. Maybe you’re tired from wrangling your kids through a bedtime routine they fight every night, and distracted by all the tasks you’re juggling at work.
So having a dedicated human planner you meet with a few times a year forces you to confront the inertia that causes many people to put off important financial decisions.
And much of financial decision making is emotion driven. My wife wants to buy a Paris apartment, and I want to spend more time traveling to dark sites to break out my favorite telescopes to observe the universe.
An AI-driven financial planner can tell us mathematically how to achieve that, but a human planner can talk through the emotions behind these goals and pry deeper to reveal our real desires actually are and how we could better achieve these dreams as a couple.
AI financial planning is not as creative as humans
AI can tell you a good answer to whatever question you ask, but what if you’re not asking the right questions?
What if you ask, “Can I retire by 60?” but in reality you could cut your hours in half by 45 and then retire completely by 55.
Will AI spot that? Not likely. It also won’t challenge your assumptions or call out risks like overconfidence bias. AI is really good and shockingly impressive, but it can’t match a human planner’s ability (yet) to spot the opportunities or blind spots you don’t know to look for as a client.
It’s not AI vs. human financial planners
Like I mentioned, I use AI all the time to look up answers to financial planning questions.
But you still have to know the right question to ask. There’s a reason “prompt engineers” are in high demand — they’re simply asking AI the correct questions to generate the most useful answers.
That’s why I predict the future of financial planning won’t be AI or humans — a lot of folks will utilize both humans and AI in their financial planning journey.
It’s similar to how the internet made good financial information more accessible to millions, but financial planners are still very much in business decades later.
In an extreme example, pretend you’re charged with a crime and want to know what plea agreement deals usually look like for a particular charge.
You’d probably trust AI to give you a range, perhaps. But would you want AI to negotiate that agreement for you? (Assuming you’re guilty.)
Most people would say they want an actual attorney who’s got experience.
In the same way, humans are unlikely to want to board an airplane without a human pilot in the cockpit for quite some time. But human pilots now receive a huge amount of help from autopilot (assistance that most passengers never notice) that helps them safely fly the plane.
So, I expect something similar with AI empowered financial planners.
You’ll see cutting-edge firms deploy AI more and more behind the scenes to enhance the advisor’s own knowledge and helpfulness, and the planner will almost be like your personal prompt engineer for what you want to figure out about your life.
At SLP Wealth, we already use AI this way. It helps us deliver advice a lot faster and more efficiently to help you get to where you want to be.
If you’d like to give working with us a try, check out our services here.
