TL;DR

Research by platform technology firm GBST with consultancy the lang cat finds UK financial advisers broadly willing to hand agentic AI the repetitive, rules-bound parts of the advice process, and distinctly less willing once a decision moves client money. The survey covered 178 advisers. Notably, a third could not describe what agentic AI actually does.

Where the appetite is

The enthusiasm concentrates in high-volume work with a defined right answer. Four in five advisers — 80% — are comfortable letting AI assemble the material behind an annual review or a suitability pack. Letters of authority and onboarding sit at 77%, know-your-customer and anti-money-laundering checks at 76%, and reconciling fees and charges at 75%.

These are tasks that consume adviser hours without a client ever noticing them, which is precisely why they are the easy yes. Rob DeDominicis, GBST’s chief executive, called it necessary work that “takes up time without adding visible value for clients”.

Where it stops

Comfort thins as decisions approach the client’s money, though it does not collapse into opposition. On pension transfers, 43% are comfortable, with 29% neutral and the same share uneasy. For switching and rebalancing within a centralised investment proposition, 53% are comfortable against 25% who are not.

Even at the cautious end, in other words, those comfortable or undecided outnumber the objectors. DeDominicis reads the pattern as advisers drawing “a sensible boundary” themselves rather than resisting the technology: “keeping people at the decision points while the system carries out the firm’s own procedure and records every step.”

The knowledge gap underneath

The finding that should give vendors pause is definitional. Nearly a third of advisers, 31%, could not say what agentic AI does, and a similar share could not name its defining trait — breaking a task into steps, planning the sequence and carrying it through without prompting. Shown a description, 62% were content for it to sit inside their existing platform, and another 18% were neutral.

That is a large swing produced purely by explanation, which makes the headline comfort figures softer than they look.

Looking forward

The research follows the Mills Review, which recommended the FCA watch the drift towards open-ended decisions taken by systems without supervision and adapt its rules accordingly. Advisers appear to have drawn that line before the regulator did. The same boundary showed up today in Expleo’s survey of UK business leaders, where trust fell away at budget approvals, and in July’s finding that conveyancers will give AI the admin but not the judgement. Three professions, three surveys, one answer.