Your buyers are already asking AI instead of asking you
In 389 public conversations about hiring a financial adviser, the AI-substitution doubt came up 29 times. It is not a future problem. People are doing it now, in public, and being corrected by strangers.
Steen Stones · Reviewed
We keep a corpus of what buyers say in public when they are deciding whether to hire a professional. Not what they tell a survey. What they write to strangers, in their own words, while they are still making up their mind.
This piece reads one slice of it: 389 demand-side voices in UK financial advice, clustered in August 2026. One cluster is the reason we are writing it.
What it looks like when it happens
In April a man in his fifties posted that he was about to come into a large sum. He had been told he needed an accountant, a financial adviser and a tax specialist. He had decided to work it out himself.
I'm 51 years old. I find myself in this position and people are telling me I need an accountant, a financial advisor and a tax specialist. However, it's in my nature to not waste money so I've been doing lots of research. I think I'll also invest £100k in an ETF or split it between a few ETFs anyway. I will drip that money in over 6 months. I've used chatgpt to make some investment pies, I am yet to fully decide on that though.
He has a hundred thousand pounds to place, he has been told by the people around him to get professional advice, and he has used ChatGPT to build the portfolio. Not because he distrusts advisers. Because it is in his nature not to waste money.
Who corrected him
Two strangers did, within the hour. One of them went through what the model had got wrong.
I would say to be cautious with ChatGPT and similar AI models. I've spotted lots of mistakes from them. For example when comparing funds failing to spot that one was denominated in USD not GBP and hence failing to talk about FX fees and spreads. Also getting simple tax advice wrong, not knowing that some taxes take personal income allowance into account.
That is a good answer. It is specific, it is correct, and it is free. It is also the answer a firm should have been giving, on a page, where an engine could find it and quote it. Instead it was given by an anonymous account to one person in one thread.
The bigger number underneath
The ChatGPT doubt is not the largest thing in the data. It sits inside something larger, and the comparison is the finding.
- Do it myself55 of 389
- A big platform20 of 389
- Do nothing for now8 of 389
- A rival firm6 of 389
Avouch buyer-voice corpus, 389 demand-side voices in UK financial advice, clustered 18 August 2026
Doing it yourself came up 55 times. A named rival firm came up 6. In this data a firm is nine times more likely to lose to the buyer deciding to handle it alone than to lose to a competitor down the road.
And the tool that makes doing it yourself feel possible is now free, confident and always available. That is what the 29 are telling you.
What this means for a firm
- Your competitor is not the firm down the road. It is the buyer deciding they can manage without anyone.
- The person doing your persuading is currently a stranger in a forum, for free, and doing it well.
- The answers that correct an AI are specific and technical. They are exactly the kind of thing a firm knows and rarely publishes.
- If nobody from your side is in the answer, the engine will quote whoever is.
How we know, and what this is not
This is 389 public conversations about hiring a financial adviser in the UK, collected from forums and review sites and clustered in August 2026. Every figure is a count of how many of those 389 raised a theme.
It is not a survey. It is not representative of everyone in the market, and the shares are not market shares. It is a measure of what people actually say, unprompted, when they are working out whether to pay a professional. We think that is more useful than a survey, and we are telling you what it is so you can judge it.