Well I can’t say I know Joeyjoejoe and I’m not sure who he is , but I admit that he expresses a view that is shared by most people who could afford to employ financial advisers (bur don’t).

Typically the monthly cost of professional AI is so low that it is lost in our subscriptions to media and is applicable in a way that a human advisor isn’t. It is the benchmark that we are beginning to value not just external advisers but our colleagues and indeed ourselves.

Here, the estimation of what a financial advisor does is called into question. For many years a financial advisor was regarded as a distributor of relatively complex financial products to the mass market of financially ignorant people. It was how a lot of insurance companies got product away and it differs today because the products are more sophisticated and so the customers.

But there is an aspiration , that has been achieved by a small percentage (Joejoe reckons it 10%) that the financial advisor’s job is to help manage the financial planning of individuals, families and businesses. Indeed, when moving into wealth management, the concept of product salesperson may be dropped for a kind of professionalism akin to legal, accountancy and what we once called stock broking.

I no longer have any professional contact with financial advisors in a professional sense, neither selling through them (as I did when at an insurer) or qualified to call myself one (before that). I do not use or pay for a financial advisor for the reason that Joejoe outlines, I do not regard them as value for money.

This is perhaps arrogant or perhaps it is because there is so much trusted information for me to access on the web. But lately it is the way to search answers to my questions that is powered by AI that I am not conscious that I’m employing.

Artificial Intelligence is search management that we guiltily settle for rather than do the job more thoroughly. Doing the job more thoroughly means either becoming a financial employer or employing – at least that’s what financial advisors hold to be an unchallengeable truth. They have been given this authority because those who are caught giving others advisors without a licence to do so, have for 40 years been liable to censure to one form of the FCA or another.

But our regulators can no longer control the explosion of available information which is taken as advice by the 90% of people who do not buy advice (my proxy for “vast majority”) and undoubtedly this is seen as a threat to regulated advisers.

I don’t think it needs be. There is now a new benchmark for what is good and as with all thinks financial , it can be judged a question of “value for money”. I do not pay for advice directly but I do use products that pay the wages of advisors one way or another.

I do have friends who are advisors and we do not talk about money for the embarrassment that both my family and  their families would feel. It is a very professional embargo as I have with lawyers and actuaries who I will only engage in high level conversations (chiefly on this blog).

I am talking money without requiring advice. When I want advice I will be demanding accountability and they take on liability as well as my fees! I pay for judgements that cannot be gleaned and trusted from chatbots (yet).

To suppose that the threat to professional financial advisors from unqualified financial advice is replicated in all other professionals. If it isn’t – it is not “professional advice” but salesmanship that is being called into question.

I have another “90%” or proxy for “vast majority” of financial advisors. I would say it is the proportion of financial advice that is purchased out of guilt in relying on what is neither professional by qualification or liable for its outcome. Artificial advice (if we can call it that) is the best that most of us feel we can get away with.