UK financial advice firms are cooling on AI as the real costs of deploying it become clear

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Dynamic Planner's chief product officer Rowan Whittington told Money Marketing that the intense enthusiasm around AI among UK financial advice firms has genuinely cooled over the past six to nine months. As businesses run into the real practical cost and scalability challenges of actually deploying the technology rather than just experimenting with it.

Whittington was direct about the underlying problem. People are finding that the reality of using AI tooling is costly, and it's not quite scalable, a gap between the pitch and the practical deployment experience that's apparently become common enough across the sector to visibly cool the earlier enthusiasm.

She placed real responsibility on the technology providers themselves. Saying tools still need genuine improvement to become more usable and scalable before firms can deploy them with confidence at real operational scale, rather than framing the slowdown purely as advisers being too cautious or slow to adopt.

Notably, Whittington framed the cooling enthusiasm as a genuinely positive development for the industry rather than a setback. Arguing that some of the hype slowing down is probably good, since it pushes firms toward evaluating technology based on whether it actually meets their specific practical requirements rather than adopting AI purely out of fear of being left behind.

This tracks with broader patterns reported elsewhere. Deloitte research has found only 16% of executives across industries have been able to present their CFO with a clear report actually demonstrating measurable value creation from AI deployment, suggesting the financial advice sector's specific experience here fits a genuinely wider corporate pattern rather than being a niche problem unique to wealth management

AI hype slows as firms confront cost and scalability challengeswww.moneymarketing.co.uk