62% of UK advisers comfortable with agentic AI on wealth platforms

TL;DR:

• A GBST survey of 178 UK financial advisers, carried out by the lang cat, found 62% are comfortable with agentic AI being used in investment platforms — but the report stresses that adoption will depend on fitting within compliance, risk and operational frameworks rather than running open-ended.
• GBST identified five priority areas: regulation as the pacing factor, AI for complex manual administration, tighter limits on autonomous decision-making, growing transparency demand, and AI embedded in core platform tech rather than bolted on.
• Resultsense view: the headline 62% number is unusually high for a regulated UK sector — but the conditions advisers are placing on agentic AI map almost exactly to the NCSC and Five Eyes joint advisory issued the same morning, which calls for layered defences, human oversight and incremental deployment.

The survey landed on the same day as the international advisory on agentic AI risks, giving UK wealth managers a single editorial reference point for both market sentiment and regulator expectations.

What advisers want

Wealth managers are expected to favour agentic AI tools that produce explainable, repeatable and auditable outcomes — particularly where customer money and long-term financial outcomes are involved. GBST argues the wider AI debate has skewed too far toward disruption rhetoric and not enough toward the operational constraints inside regulated firms. Regulation is named as the primary pacing factor for the next two years.

Where the deployment sits

GBST sees clearer use cases in back-office functions than in client-facing tools — specifically, the high-volume administrative work that varies between wealth managers and has resisted traditional rules-based automation. AI integrated into core platform technology is preferred over standalone tools running outside the main environment, because the same governance, monitoring and oversight already applied to the platform should apply to the AI processes running on it.

UK financial services context

Sixty-two per cent acceptance of agentic AI sits ahead of figures published in recent FCA, PRA and Bank of England communications about AI in financial services, where the language remains markedly more cautious. The gap between adviser sentiment and regulator caution is itself the policy story — it suggests UK platforms will need to pre-empt regulatory expectations on auditability and oversight if they want to deploy at the pace advisers will accept. GBST CEO Rob DeDominicis argued that “AI can deliver efficiency gains, but only if it operates within established safeguards, executing processes consistently and transparently.”

Looking forward

Expect the FCA to fold agentic AI explicitly into its forthcoming guidance on AI in financial services, building on its existing work on operational resilience and the Senior Managers and Certification Regime accountability for AI decisions. UK platform technology vendors that can demonstrate auditable agentic deployment within existing supervisory expectations stand to win the next wave of platform refresh decisions across wealth management and pensions.