Why Australia's financial advisers will be more valuable in 10 years, not less

A story is being told about Australian financial advice that I think gets the picture badly wrong.

The story goes something like this. The adviser population has collapsed from roughly 26,500 to around 15,600 since the Royal Commission. Compliance costs are rising, and margins are compressing. Robo-advice and artificial intelligence are coming for the rest. On this telling, the profession is in long, slow decline.

The numbers in that story are largely accurate. The conclusion is wrong.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is genuinely changing the economics of investment allocation. Systems can now model risk, allocate assets, screen securities, and rebalance portfolios faster and more cheaply than humans. The purely technical part of advice - the part that has underpinned the industry's pricing model for thirty years - is slowly but visibly becoming infrastructure.

The mistake is to assume that this means the adviser is becoming infrastructure, too.

The opposite is happening. As technical execution becomes cheaper, the things AI cannot do are becoming more valuable, not less. AI does not manage a family succession conflict. It does not sit with two business partners who built something together over decades and help them have the conversation neither of them wants to have. It doesn't coordinate an accountant, a lawyer, and a financial adviser around a single SME owner's plan. These are not peripheral problems. They are precisely where most Australian business owners need help, and where they receive almost none.

Australia is facing the largest intergenerational wealth transfer in its history - somewhere between the Productivity Commission's $3.5 trillion estimate and JB Were's more recent $5.4 trillion figure over the next two decades. A meaningful share of that transfer will involve a business. And the three professions meant to help - financial advisers, accountants, lawyers - are, all three at once, under unprecedented strain.

The adviser's collapse is well documented. Less recognised is that the same pressure is now reaching the other two professions. From 1 July 2026, Australia's anti-money-laundering  regime extends, for the first time, to accountants - a substantial new compliance burden landing on a profession whose university enrolments have almost halved since 2018. The legal profession has headcount but rarely has deep specialisation in succession and estate work, at a time when that work is becoming increasingly complex.

You cannot solve a problem this size by adding more specialists. The training pipelines aren't in place, and even if they were, the work itself is becoming more multidisciplinary, not less. The owner of a $4 million business now needs an accountant who understands the proposed trust tax, a lawyer who understands the post-Budget position on testamentary trusts, and a financial adviser who understands how to fund what the other two have agreed. Each professional knows their part. Almost no one has been holding the whole picture together.

That gap - between three separate sources of expertise and one coordinated plan - is where the next generation of advice must land. The adviser of the future is not someone who picks better funds. It is someone who becomes the strategic relationship lead in a client's life: the continuity coordinator, the one who brings the A-team together, the trusted figure who guides a family or a business through the decisions that matter most and occur rarely. The work is harder than picking funds. It is also considerably more valuable, harder for technology to displace, and genuinely in critically short supply.

For advisers, this is not bad news. It is the most significant strategic opportunity the profession has had in a generation - provided the profession acts. The window to evolve is open now, but it will not stay open forever. Advisers who add succession planning, family governance, and business continuity to their practice are building something AI does not threaten. Advisers who do not are betting their business model on a market whose margins are visibly 
compressing.

The same logic, in reverse, applies to clients. A business owner who still believes the most important question their adviser can answer is "how should my portfolio be allocated" is asking the wrong question - and getting answers that will matter less over time than the questions they are not asking. What happens if a business partner dies, becomes ill, or wants out? Who would buy this business, and at what price? Has anyone in the room coordinated the lawyer, the accountant, and the adviser around a single plan? The Australian financial advice profession is not dying. It is being asked by the market and by technology to step into a more strategic, more human, and more valuable role than the one it has occupied.

The advisers who make that step will be more relevant in ten years than they are today.

Brian Boggs is the author of the upcoming bookThe Advice Gap: Why Business Succession Needs Clarity where he draws on his 30-year experience to address the underlying issue affecting Australian businesses and families.