Executive Summary
Technology presents a dual-edged sword for financial advisors. On the one hand, technology can make the advisor's job easier by expediting (or outright automating) many of the tasks that advisors do for their clients. But on the other hand, that technology can also make it easier for clients to manage their finances on their own, raising the bar for the value that human advisors must provide to make it worthwhile for clients to hire them in the face of less expensive DIY alternatives.
Despite advances in technology, human advisors remain in strong demand, and the gap between the number of clients seeking an advisor and the number of advisors available to serve them is only growing. Which means there's something about working with a human advisor that still resonates with clients – which ultimately comes down to the advisor's ability to connect with the client on a human level, to understand and validate their goals and values, and to motivate them to reach those goals, none of which can be fully replicated by technology.
As evidence of the human effect on financial advice, a recent study by the AI meeting note tool Jump analyzed thousands of client meeting transcripts and showed that on average, meeting with financial advisors helped raise a client's emotional state (in terms of the feelings of positivity, confidence, and certainty they expressed) materially from the start of a meeting to the finish. The effect persisted even when external events (e.g., market volatility or events in the client's life) negatively affected the client's emotional state going into the meeting, underscoring the value advisors can provide when the client is feeling pessimistic or uncertain about their financial situation.
Furthermore, Jump's analysis found that certain behaviors and actions by advisors during client meetings strongly affected their ability to influence clients' emotional state. For instance, advisors who frequently used either empathetic statements (e.g., saying "that must be hard for you" or "you must be so excited!" in response to the client's situation) or emotional check-ins (e.g., asking "How are you feeling about that?" when it's less certain about how the client sees the situation) were able to raise their clients' emotional state by nearly twice as much as those who used those techniques the least. Which gives advisors a concrete set of skills to better connect with and manage their clients' emotional state – in other words, exactly the type of human connection that clients value most about working with a human advisor!
Ultimately, with advances in AI increasing the capabilities of technology to compete with human advisors, advisors are often told they must become experts in technology to deliver the kind of service clients demand. But the evidence shows that the better investment may be for advisors to lean into their 'human' abilities to connect and communicate with clients on an emotional level – because while technology is constantly evolving and today's tech skills might be outdated in a year (or less), the human skills that clients really value will serve advisors for their entire careers!
Why do clients hire financial advisors?
To some, the answer might be "to manage their clients' investments", which is often literally true in the sense that most advisors bill as a percentage of their clients' assets under management (AUM). But many advisors (even those who bill based on AUM) might instead say that what they're really paid for is financial planning, since that's what they actually center their value proposition around. While AUM may be the billing method, the true product is the planning strategies that the advisor devises to help their clients meet their financial goals.
But while those are all undeniably parts of a financial advisor's job, they don't tell the full story of why clients actually hire advisors. To focus on the many individual things that advisors do for their clients is to ignore that most of those things could, in theory, be done by clients themselves, either on their own or with the help of technology. An individual could use one of the plethora of robo-advisors to recommend and manage an asset-allocated portfolio at a fraction of the cost of a human advisor. They could use an app like Monarch to track their cash flow and net worth, or DIY planning software like Boldin, Maxifi, or ProjectionLab to run planning projections and Monte Carlo analysis on par with what advisor-specific tools like eMoney and RightCapital provide. They could read or listen to Ramit Sethi, Katie Gatti Tassin, AJ Ayers, or any of the other great consumer-focused financial writers and podcasters for generalized wisdom and strategies to manage their own money. They could even get some reasonable financial planning advice from an AI chatbot like Claude or ChatGPT.
Financial advisors don't have any magic tricks up their sleeve, or products or strategies that aren't available to the general public. In the past, advisors could cite access to lower-fund institutional mutual fund shares or to advisor-only fund families such as Dimensional Fund Advisors as part of their value proposition, but that bit of excess value was eroded away by the systemic shift to ETFs that any retail investor can purchase. Even sophisticated investment products and strategies like alternative investments (e.g., the growing number of semiliquid "interval funds" investing in private equity and credit) and direct indexing (e.g., Fidelity's FidFolios managed accounts) can be accessed on a direct-to-consumer basis.
And yet, despite the vast number of lower-cost alternatives, consumers still hire financial advisors. Indeed, by many estimates, there are more potential advisory clients than advisors who can work with them, and that shortage is only expected to increase in the coming years. So, there must be some reason that people pay thousands of dollars each year to work with human financial advisors that goes beyond their ability to recommend and implement investment portfolios, create planning projections, or tell clients what they should do with their money, otherwise clients would overwhelmingly flock to lower-cost alternatives for those functions.
I would propose that what causes clients to hire human financial advisors is the fact that they are humans. And that there are some qualities about working with a human – which will be discussed more below – that allow the client to get more out of the advice and services that the advisor offers than if they were to go it alone. For clients, these qualities are what make it worth paying multiples more in fees each year for a human advisor, even when each individual thing that the advisor does could theoretically be replicated by technology or other DIY solutions.
What Clients Value In A Human Advisor
What are the qualities that a human advisor brings to the relationship that make it worth the extra cost?
At one level, there's simply the outsourcing factor. There's a significant time cost for people to do the research, planning, and implementation work needed to manage their own finances as well as a professional could do for them. For people with busy lives and high incomes, the time savings of working with an advisor to handle their financial lives might make up for the cost all on its own.
But there may be other less visible factors that influence clients' decision to hire a human advisor:
- Trust. Perhaps the biggest reason that someone would hire a human financial advisor is that they trust a professional to do a better job than the client would do themselves. Particularly as financial situations become more complex and the cost of mistakes grows higher, the value of hiring a professional whom the client knows has the expertise to handle it grows in turn.
- Objectivity. Even people who are fairly knowledgeable about financial matters can be prone to biases and oversight when looking at their own financial situations. A second pair of eyes on the situation can help the client spot issues they may have overlooked, raise questions they hadn't thought of, and suggest strategies they hadn't considered. Hence, for example, many financial advisors work with their own third-party advisors to provide an honest and objective assessment of their own situation, even though they're already very familiar with how to create a financial plan for somebody else!
- Empathy. A lot of people are uncertain about what they really want in life, which makes it hard for them to take the actions they need to improve their situation. A financial advisor can be an empathetic listener, helping the client think through their feelings, desires, and fears around money and clarifying the pain points and goals that need to be prioritized. Hearing that information reflected back to them can give clients the clarity and motivation they need to move past decision paralysis and take action. And while AI chatbots have grown better at mimicking human empathy (such that chatbots can actually be perceived as more empathetic than humans), additional research has suggested that empathy that comes from a human has more of a positive impact that empathy performed by a chatbot (grounded in our social desire to be understood and accepted by other humans, which doesn't extend to our relationship with technology)
- Accountability. When a person takes on the management of their own financial situation, they retain the accountability for any actions that they decide to take. They might use software to implement and track their own strategies and consume blogs or podcasts to give them guidance, but it's ultimately up to them to make the right choices for themselves. A human advisor can be a client's accountability partner – someone who motivates the client to keep going when they might have otherwise lost momentum – far better than software, because of the innate human desire to live up to others' expectations.
- Continuity. When clients hire a financial advisor, what they're often seeking is an ongoing relationship with someone who will get to know them (and their goals, values, and preferences) better and better over time, and with whom they can establish trust and develop a rapport. When this element is missing, clients simply don't place as much value on the planning and advice they receive: For example, Charles Schwab failed to gain significant traction with its Intelligent Portfolios Premium and ultimately shut the service down (despite offering access to advice from CFP professionals for just a $300 upfront planning fee and $30/month thereafter) at least in part because there was little continuity between which advisor would answer the phone for a given client from one day to the next. The premium clients place on an ongoing relationship suggests that there's really something about continuity that results in better advice that sticks with the client over time.
Other factors might come into play as well. For instance, a client might have a very specific tax or estate planning issue, or a concentrated stock holding they need help dealing with, where the advisor's specific expertise in that subject matter would be the main reason for being hired. But that expertise may mean little without the factors above: A nonexpert client has no hard evidence that the advisor knows what they're talking about, and might rely on other expertise signifiers like media appearances or referrals from existing clients – but they must ultimately trust their gut that the advisor really has the expertise they're seeking. Clients might be able to seek out the same information via a Google search or ChatGPT query, but the qualities the human advisor brings are what cause clients to trust that advice.
So while these key elements of human advice aren't technical in the sense that they don't require specific knowledge about retirement planning, investment, tax, or anything else that could live in a spreadsheet, they do require advisors to show emotional intelligence, to coach clients through the implementation and continuation of their advice, and above all to show up for their clients such that the client knows there really is a human on the other side of the relationship – which not only helps the advice land more effectively to improve outcomes, but also not-so-coincidentally can result in a relationship where the client sees the value of what they're getting in return for their fee.
How Human Advisors (Positively) Influence Clients' Emotional State
If there are certain qualities that clients value most when deciding to hire a human advisor, it follows that the advisors who most embody these qualities will be the most valued and sought after by clients.
It's hard to quantify exactly how advisors display qualities that emphasize their human-ness, and how that translates into client trust. These are by their nature subjective qualities that vary from person to person and resist concrete definition. But there's clearly something in the way advisors interact and communicate with clients that brings out the human side of their advice and builds the trust that makes that advice stick.
One notable attempt to quantify the impact of advisor-client interaction comes from the AI client meeting support technology provider Jump in its recently released 2026 Financial Advisor Insights Report. For this report, Jump analyzed approximately 12,000 anonymized advisor-client meeting transcripts captured over a 1-year period (from firms that agreed to share meeting data for research purposes, or who at least didn't opt out of data sharing). The report flagged notable data, including conversation topics and recommendations made. But perhaps the most consequential data point to emerge from the report was about client sentiment – that is, the perceived emotional state of a client at a given point during a conversation.
To quantify client sentiment, Jump analyzes statements made by clients during a meeting that express either positive (e.g., happiness, confidence, and clarity) or negative (e.g., anxiety, uncertainty, and confusion) sentiment. It then uses those statements to calculate a "Client Sentiment Index" score on a 1–10 scale (1 being the most negative and 10 the most positive). The resulting client sentiment scores can then be compared against a wide range of factors, like what topics were being discussed at the time and what events were going on in the client's life. The scores can also be compared over time, e.g., from one meeting to the next or from the beginning to the end of a single meeting.
Jump's analysis found that client sentiment tends to improve over the course of a meeting with an advisor. On average, between the beginning and the end of a meeting, client sentiment improved by around one point on Jump's 10-point scale. This was true even though overall client sentiment fluctuated over the course of the year of conversations that Jump analyzed: For example, client sentiment at the start of a meeting dipped on average around March and April of 2025 amid the market volatility and economic uncertainty surrounding President Trump's tariff announcements – but despite the lower starting point, sentiment still improved by more than one point by the end of the meeting.
The other key finding in Jump's report was that, while on average across all advisors client sentiment tends to improve over the course of a meeting, certain advisors were consistently more successful at improving client sentiment than others. Going deeper, Jump then identified four key factors that were primarily associated with advisors' ability to influence client sentiment:
- The advisor's "talk time" as a percentage of the total meeting dialogue (i.e., advisors who talked the least during meetings compared to their clients saw the highest increase in client sentiment)
- The number of open-ended questions asked (i.e., questions that invite the client to elaborate and talk about their thoughts and feelings), which clearly relates to the first element above: If an advisor asks open-ended questions and then gets out of the way for the client to respond in depth, the client will naturally have a higher share of the total "talk time" during the meeting
- The number of "empathetic statements" made by the advisor during the meeting (i.e., statements that show that the advisor understands and can relate to what the client is saying, such as "that must have been hard for you")
- The number of "emotional check-ins" performed by the advisor (i.e., inviting the client to share what they're feeling at a particular moment, such as asking "how does that make you feel?")
Jump combined these four elements into a single metric that it calls the "Advisor Emotional Intelligence Score". They then separated the advisors whose meetings were analyzed into five "ranks" based on their scores, from highest (Rank 1) to lowest (Rank 5). Finally, Jump examined how client sentiment improved on average during meetings with advisors across the five ranks. The result: While advisors in each rank were able to improve client sentiment during their meetings, advisors in the highest rank saw almost twice as much improvement on average (1.14 points on the 10-point client sentiment scale) as advisors in the lowest rank (0.59 points).
It's also worth noting that, as the graphic above shows, advisors with higher emotional intelligence scores tended to have higher client sentiment at the start of their meetings as well – suggesting that clients of advisors who show emotional awareness and empathy seem to not only improve their emotional state over the course of a meeting, but come into meetings in a better state as well. Or to put it differently, there may be something about working with these advisors that leads to a permanently improved emotional state for their clients.
Nerd Note:
The four criteria that Jump uses to calculate its "Advisor Emotional Intelligence Score" arguably don't compose a complete picture of an advisor's actual emotional intelligence. Traditional definitions of emotional intelligence define it as the ability to recognize and manage emotions in oneself and in others. Jump's metric, with its emphasis on things like empathetic statements and emotional check-ins, is primarily focused on the "and others" side of the equation – and while it can be argued that it's difficult to recognize and manage others' emotions without also being able to do so for oneself, Jump's metric doesn't actually measure that directly.
The key takeaways from Jump's report, then, are that:
- Meeting with a human financial advisor can likely have a positive impact on a client's emotional state, regardless of the advisor;
- Some advisors have more success in improving their clients' emotional state than others (both during the meeting itself and from one meeting to the next); and
- There are certain key skills and behaviors associated with advisors who achieved the most improvement in client sentiment.
These findings in part affirm decades of research showing that an advisor's communication style is one of the pillars (if not the pillar) of building client trust. But more than that, they identify specific communication techniques that have been shown to actually improve clients' emotional states during and between meetings – which advisors can learn and practice to deepen their own ability to connect with clients on a human level and improve their clients' emotional state.
Putting Human Advice Into Practice
According to Jump, the two components of the Advisor Emotional Intelligence Score that were most associated with improved client sentiment were the prevalence of empathetic statements and emotional check-ins during the meeting. The other two components (talk time and open-ended questions) matter as well, but for an advisor looking for a place to start refining their communication style, these two areas would be the place to start.
Empathetic statements and emotional check-ins are related in that they both prompt the client to reflect on their emotional state; however, as their names imply, one is a statement while the other takes the form of a question. The different forms these interjections take make them appropriate for different situations that might crop up during a client meeting.
For example, the statement form is more appropriate when the impact of a given situation on the client's emotional state is clear.
Example 1: Brian, a financial advisor, is meeting with his client, Dierdre. Dierdre has asked to meet with Brian because her elderly mother has had a health scare and will need to move into an assisted living facility. As an only child, Dierdre is solely responsible for supporting her mother and wants to know how the added expense will impact her ability to retire within the next year, as she had planned.
The conversation starts as follows:
Brian: So tell me a little bit about why you wanted to meet today.
Dierdre: Well, I feel kind of overwhelmed by everything. My mother's health is the most important thing to me, and I want to make sure that she gets the care that she needs. But every time I think about how much money this is going to cost, I just shut down – I kind of want to just stick my head in the sand and ignore it. If this is going to be a problem for my long-term plans, though, I want to know that before it's too late to do anything about it. So that's why I wanted to talk through this with someone.
It's clear how Dierdre feels in this situation: She's anxious about her mother's health, scared about how the cost of assisted living will affect her own financial health, and overwhelmed at trying to think about both at the same time. This is a good time for Brian to make an empathetic statement acknowledging Dierdre's emotions at this moment.
Brian: That must be a stressful situation.
It doesn't take much more than that: Just a simple statement affirming what the advisor and the client both know that the client is feeling. It's important not to pivot too quickly into trying to 'solve' anything for the client at this point (e.g., to add "so what can I do to help?" immediately after the empathetic statement), since the client might read that as the advisor wanting to push past the emotional part of the meeting as quickly as possible, minimizing the role that the client's human feelings will play in finding a solution. Leaving the statement open gives the client space to share further if they want to and serves as affirmation that the client's feelings really matter.
On the other hand, an emotional check-in in the form of a question is better when it's not entirely clear how the client feels about the situation.
Example 2: Andi, a financial advisor, is meeting with her clients, Jamelle and Isabella. Jamelle has recently found out that he is being laid off from his job, and he wants to decide whether he should start looking for a new job or use the layoff as an opportunity to start his own consulting business.
In this case, Andi knows the basic information about the situation, but doesn't really know what's going through her clients' heads about it. Is starting a business really something that Jamelle wants in this moment? How does he weigh the stable income and benefits of being an employee against the independence and upside potential of owning a business? How does Isabella feel about being the primary breadwinner in the family while the business gets off the ground?
It's a good opportunity, then, for Andi to open the conversation with a couple of check-in questions to gauge her clients' overall thoughts before diving into the planning details.
Andi: So just to start out: How are you feeling about all of this?
Jamelle: When I first got the news that I was getting laid off, I was more shocked than anything. But when I got to thinking about it, I realized that I didn't actually feel that sad about it. I liked my job, but it wasn't something I was all that passionate about. And I started to think about how this might be the push I need to start my own thing – I've always wanted to work for myself, but my job paid pretty well and wasn't so terrible that I wanted to give it up. And so now I'm thinking, if I'm in this position of leaving my job anyway, why not go for it? But now that initial excitement has started to wear off a little bit, and I'm feeling the reality sink in that starting my own business might mean being without much income for a while, and needing to buy my own health insurance, and well…I still think it's what I want to do, but I want to make sure we're really in a position to do this right now.
Andi: I see. So it sounds like a mix of emotions: a little bit of surprise about where you are now, a lot of excitement about the opportunity to do something you've been wanting to do, and some nervousness about how you're actually going to make it work. Isabella, how about you – what are you feeling about this?
Isabella: Well, I want to support Jamelle in what he wants to do, but frankly, I'm a little nervous about whether we have the resources to live off of my income alone until the business gets off the ground. We might be able to manage it for a while, but I'm worried about whether we'll be able to weather an emergency if one comes along. So I'd just like to have a little more clarity about our financial situation before we commit to doing this.
As the conversation above shows, when working with couples, emotional check-in questions can be a good opportunity to get both spouses involved (particularly when one spouse tends to do most of the talking in meetings). But in any case, these questions can help to surface the specific fears and pain points that the clients bring into the meeting – which then gives the advisor a clearer idea of what problem needs to actually be solved in the meeting.
Why "Human" Advice Will Matter (Even More) In The Age Of AI
There's a lot of debate today about whether the rise of AI tools (both professional tools for financial advisors and general-purpose tools for DIYers) will fundamentally affect the value of human advice. With AI technology moving beyond the role of taking meeting notes and drafting follow-up emails and becoming more and more involved in the process of giving advice itself, some argue that the advisory fee model could collapse, and future "advisors" could end up relegated to a role of managing the AI systems that now do all of the jobs they used to do.
But at the same time that advisors are told that they need to become technology experts to survive into the next decade, the actual evidence on display in Jump's study suggests that the opposite is true: Advisors who lean into their human-ness are the ones that do the best job at responding to their clients' true wants and needs, and therefore are the ones whom clients will continue to value most. So it's the advisors who invest in developing these skills – fostering empathy, emotional and behavioral management, and good judgment when weighing the client's needs against potential strategies – who will continue to be in demand in the age of AI.
While technical expertise will still matter, particularly for niche planning topics where the amount of training material for AI tools to learn from is comparatively thin. Learning the skills to communicate and connect with clients will become all the more important in the age of AI. Training programs and services like Amplified Planning, Money Quotient, Beyond The Plan, and the Kinder Institute's Registered Life Planner program that teach advisors meeting and communications skills beyond technical expertise will become important resources for both new and experienced advisors in the coming years – and are arguably a better investment than chasing every new development in AI that comes along, since while AI will likely evolve rapidly over the coming years, the skills to communicate with clients on a human level will serve advisors throughout their entire careers.
That isn't to say that advisors should ignore AI entirely. It still could have a profound impact on the industry at large – but contrary to the high degree of certainty that many pundits put into their predictions, AI's real impact is still highly uncertain. As the CFP Board highlighted in its Harnessing AI In The Financial Planning Profession report late last year, multiple AI futures are still possible, ranging from a steady advancement of efficiency tools that handle more and more of advisors' busywork to widespread disruption caused by low-cost retail AI apps to a collapse in public trust in AI that relegates the technology to mostly behind-the-scenes roles. But what all those potential futures have in common is that it is advisors' human skills that make them stand out… which is not a new concept for the age of AI, but is simply a continuation of how the value of human advice has come into focus throughout decades of technological advancement!
The key point is not that all human advisors will inevitably survive the age of AI. But the long arc of the financial planning profession has shown that when technology comes along that promises to replace human advisors, the advisors who survive are those who lean into building even deeper bonds of trust with their clients. And, more often than not, those advisors don't just survive, but become even more valued by the clients they serve. Regardless of the future of AI in financial planning, then, an investment in building those human skills is a sound, evidence-based investment in what clients really value in a human advisor.
Leave a Reply