What To Do When Clients Bring AI-Generated Advice to Meetings

How is artificial intelligence changing the advisor-client relationship, and what happens when clients bring AI-generated advice into meetings?

In this video, Morningstar's Thomas Aviles, Head of Advisor Software, Direct Platform, speaks with Joe Agostinelli, Senior Director of Market Research, Global Content Strategy who shares insights from Morningstar Investor Perspectives advisor focus groups on how AI is reshaping client expectations. As investors gain easier access to AI-generated research and recommendations, advisors are increasingly being asked to evaluate and contextualize that information.

Agostinelli argues that an advisor's value lies not in providing information alone, but in applying judgment, personal context, and behavioral coaching. Advisors who can help clients separate useful AI insights from generic recommendations will be best positioned to build trust and deepen relationships in an AI-enabled world.

The full research explores how artificial intelligence is reshaping the advisor-client relationship and what it means for the future of financial advice. Download the report to learn:

• How advisors are responding as clients increasingly bring AI-generated research, investment ideas, and planning questions into meetings.
• Why human expertise remains critical, including the role of judgment, personalization, behavioral coaching, and contextual decision-making in an AI-enabled advice landscape.
• Practical strategies advisors can use to incorporate AI into client conversations, strengthen trust, and demonstrate value as access to financial information becomes more widespread.

Joe Agostinelli: Bringing a slide in here. This doesn't have any numbers on it, but this is from our advisor focus groups that we held at our Morningstar investment conference over the summer.

We get advisors together. We want to talk about some results that we hear from the retail investor survey and also some other topics as we prepare to get this survey in field.

A few things came up in terms of what is going on with their clients now, in the present. What are they facing? What are they hearing? What are they seeing? What's going on with their clients?

That AI piece is really interesting because in a focus group we did later on in the fall, we were talking to advisers, and this gets back to you hear about AI and you hear about efficiency and just making things better overall.

But this adviser pointed out, you know, I'm all for clients doing their own research, educating themselves, bringing questions.

Agostinelli: But some of the things that AI is generating for them can be a time suck as well.

So he mentioned specifically a client who came to a meeting and said, "Hey, I was doing some research via AI, chatting with AI, and it said that this investment product was going to be a great fit for me and my situation and what I was trying to accomplish."

And the adviser said, "We've spent years having this relationship. I understand your long-term goals. I understand your financial situation. We've planned this whole thing out.

And then when you bring something in and you feel very confident about what AI has told you is a potentially good investment option, then we have to kind of get you back out of that. We have to say, okay, well, it's not for these reasons and go over things that we've already covered in the past."

So as much as it can be a help and a good information source in some ways, in other ways it can be detrimental in terms of time spent between the adviser and the client.

Thomas Aviles: I mean, that is a huge concern and challenge, I would say, because AI is able to present bad and biased information in really confident ways, right? And so in this case, it sounds like AI wasn't saving time. It was actually creating more work for the advisor in this case.

Agostinelli: Yeah, it may be saving in other ways, but in this particular instance it was definitely adding time that they shouldn't have to be spending talking about those kind of things.

Agostinelli: The middle one, clients are overwhelmed.

That one, I think, ties back to what we saw at the start of the deck with clients being price- or fee-sensitive coming down over the last few years.

There's just so much more information out there that they really need to lean into their relationship with their adviser to separate the signal from the noise.

And that's becoming more and more of a challenge as more information is out there, more information is easily accessible, and generated from all these different sources.