Everyone’s asking whether AI will replace the adviser. Farming answered that one years ago.
There’s a question doing the rounds in financial advice and I’ve started to wonder if we’re asking the right one. What’s left for the adviser – those working across employee benefits, tax planning, high-net worth investment advice and paraplanners who make this industry work.
I’ll be upfront, I’m biased. I work in wealthtech, but I also grew up on a farm, and for most of my career those two halves of my life have had nothing to say to each other. Then I watched the latest series of ‘Clarkson’s Farm’ and they finally collided.
Farming has already been through all of this. The machines arrived and took over the work, my family lived it across generations. I grew up in the middle of it, helping with lambing, bottle-feeding the struggling ones, out in the harvest heat when everyone raced to beat the rain. Hard, physical teamwork that I loved. I didn’t want it as my life, but I understood it from the inside and that turned out to matter.
Watching Jeremy Clarkson flail about on TV, I realised the answer to his problems was standing right next to him the whole time, holding a clipboard and looking mildly worried – Charlie.
The man with the clipboard
Charlie Ireland is Jeremy’s land agent and adviser, the one who sits between the latest big idea and what the weather, the rules, and the bank will allow. Driverless machinery arrives at Diddly Squat, and underneath it all sits the same question anyone feels when a machine first offers to make a decision… can I trust this thing?
The technology is remarkable. It still hasn’t got any judgment, that comes unglamorously from Charlie, the one who says, “not yet”, who can tell a thrilling risk from a ruinous one before anyone’s signed anything.
Every Jeremy needs a Charlie. And that’s true beyond the world of farming.
The lesson three generations kept learning
My dad’s still farming at 79. Across his lifetime the work moved from muscle to machinery and that’s the only reason his body has kept up. He worked out what to keep and let the machines have the rest. His father did the same when the tractors first arrived. The tools changed beyond recognition. The part that mattered, never did.
That’s the choice in front of every advice firm right now. AI is doing to financial advice what the tractor did to the plough, and that’s a good thing, if we’re automating the right parts. The value was never in the grind; it’s in the judgment.
Good modular wealthtech lets a firm decide what to keep human and what to hand to the machine, whether that’s guidance for someone not yet ready for advice, a hybrid model where digital and human work together, or full regulated advice where the stakes demand it. The architecture should follow the client’s needs.
The part the industry keeps missing
We don’t process risk as a percentage. We process it as a feeling, often late at night when markets are down and the plan that looked solid in the meeting suddenly feels fragile. Good modelling doesn’t remove that uncertainty, it makes it legible before the fear sets in. The adviser who helps a client feel the future, not just understand it, who reads the room and responds to what’s happening, that’s not peripheral to the work, it is the work.
‘Clarkson’s Farm’ made the brutal economics of farming gripping, funny, impossible to switch off. It made the invisible visible, and that’s the challenge we haven’t cracked in financial advice. People don’t disengage because it’s complicated, they disengage because nothing about how it’s presented connects to how the brain makes decisions: through stories, through emotion, through a felt sense of what’s at stake. Present bias means the future self feels like a stranger. Loss aversion means the downside always loom larger.
The tools will keep getting better, faster, cleverer. But the architecture those tools sit within – who gets guidance, who gets a hybrid journey, who gets a hand on the shoulder from someone who knows them, that’s a strategic decision, not a default setting. The firms that get it right will be the ones who made it deliberately, with their clients’ experience at the centre of it.
The value stays exactly where it’s always been, with the person who understands not just the plan, but the human sitting across the table from them. Every Jeremy needs a Charlie. Our job is to build the kind of technology that lets these people get on with doing their job, and to feel confident that this human element was always the point.
