A friend sent me the new BCG white paper on how AI is rewiring wealth management, and I want to be fair to it. This is a good paper, and the direction is right. AI is going to reshape the delivery economics of advice, and any firm telling itself otherwise is going to get run over.
I will go further than BCG did on that point. Financial planning, portfolio construction, servicing, compliance, that work is getting commoditized faster than most owners want to admit, and pretending your version of it is special is not a strategy…it’s a fantasy.
So this is not me crapping on AI. I use it every day. This is me pointing out that the paper way oversells the advantage and stays quiet about the cost.
Here is the part BCG buries in their own artwork. Look at Exhibit 2: they sort the entire value chain into what AI can drive and what stays human, and the human column, the part they admit AI barely touches, is referrals, coaching, multi-generational strategy, and the trusted advisor relationship.
That is their conclusion, not mine. The durable moat is the human trust layer. They spend most of the paper selling the machine and then quietly concede that the machine cannot hold the one thing that actually keeps clients. That is exactly where CIBYC lives, so when people ask me whether AI is coming for the referral, I tell them they have the direction backwards.
The temptation is to say AI cannot do judgment, that it is fake judgment and that it misses the human, so it will never touch the real work. I understand the instinct, and I half agree with it, but be careful, because that argument will get you tuned out by any client who is already using an AI tax tool and liking it.
Here is reality: AI does not need to replicate human judgment to commoditize it.
AI only needs to be good enough at a lower price. The steam loom never replicated the weaver. It just made the weaver’s craft irrelevant for most cloth. A lot of what advisors have been calling judgment for years is pattern matching wearing a suit, and AI is very good at pattern matching. That layer is going to get exposed and repriced, and honestly it should. It is the same thing I have been saying about fee opacity. AI reveals what was never as bespoke as it was billed.
The great news is that there is a kind of judgment AI structurally cannot enter, and it is worth naming precisely because the vague version is weak. It is relational judgment, the judgment where the relationship itself is an input.
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