Can AI fix Australia's advice gap?

Australia's financial advice industry has a problem most industries would envy: demand outstrips what the system can provide. The number of advisers has roughly halved since 2019, the cost to deliver a single piece of advice keeps climbing, and millions of Australians who want help can't affordably get it.

This is more than an advice industry problem. Research conducted by Signal Advisory surveying 2973 Australians shows the system breaking down where it matters most. Of those without a financial adviser, 81% believe affordable advice would help them. The cost of leaving that need unmet shows up at retirement. Account-based pensions are the main way retirees draw a tax-free income from super, yet only 17% of unadvised Australians are fully familiar with them, compared with 44 per cent of those who have an adviser.

Policy has focused on creating more efficient pathways for new advisers to enter the industry, but these have yet to move the dial on adviser numbers. The other way to reach more Australians is to let existing advisers serve more clients, and that is where much of the industry's effort, and its investment in artificial intelligence (AI), is now going. In a study of 839 advice professionals across Australia and New Zealand conducted by Signal Advisory and commissioned by Iress, 81% told us their business has the client demand to fill a 30% increase in adviser capacity. Practices are held back because the machinery of producing advice is slow, manual and expensive.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the obvious lever, and advisers have already reached for it. 72% are piloting AI or running it in production, and 47% of firms using AI say they save at least a quarter of their time on the tasks where they use it.

The economics tell a different story. Only 20% of firms report a lower cost to serve. 5% have retired any software as a result of AI, and 63% say AI has been added to the list of technologies used in the practice without replacing anything. The productivity gains exist, but they are being absorbed back into existing processes rather than flowing through to the economics of the business.

Part of the reason is where AI has landed. 81% of firms use AI for meeting notes and file notes; 8% use it to produce Statements of Advice, which 45% rate as considerably burdensome, more than any other task.

Value also leaks at the hand-offs, where a client file moves between team members with various instructions from senior staff. 30% of firms using AI say checking its output

consumes much of the time it saves, and a faster first draft that still needs a human rewrite does not shorten the process. The simpler Statement of Advice requirements proposed under Delivering Better Financial Outcomes reforms are expected to help, but the hand-offs and the checking will remain.

Clients are clear about what they want from advice. Asked what they value most about advice, 32% of Australians surveyed chose "having someone I can call when I have questions", the most common answer. They are also taking those questions to AI: 30% have asked ChatGPT or a similar tool about their super, and 13% have found a financial adviser through one. Every hour AI saves, whether in producing advice documents or in getting clients' questions answered sooner, is time an adviser can spend supporting more clients.

If AI is going to help advisers make their services accessible to more Australians, two things must change.

The first is measurement. 58% of firms say hard evidence of hours saved per adviser would most justify further investment in AI, yet only 28% have measured the time or cost impact of their tools. Only once the benefit is measured and proven will the industry commit to more transformational AI-led improvements. Those advice firms better at doing this will have greater success when it comes to providing advice to more Australians.

The second is trust, and this is where the policy conversation matters. 89% of firms using AI run general-purpose assistants, yet 31% of respondents would not trust a large global AI company to deliver AI for regulated advice, and 64% say regulators have not provided enough clarity on how AI can be used in advice. Advisers need confidence in the data, the controls and the accountability around a tool before they put it near a client's financial future. The firms and platforms that win will treat governance and transparency as central guardrails from the outset.

Seventy-eight percent of advice professionals believe firms that have not adopted AI within two years will be at a competitive disadvantage, and they are right. The task is to move AI out of the pilot and into the heaviest work, and measure whether the time it saves becomes capacity to serve more clients.

Get that right and advice becomes structurally cheaper to produce. For the first time in years, the industry would have a credible way to reach the many Australians who want advice but can't get it. The constraint isn't demand. It is our willingness to reimagine and rebuild how advice is produced.