By Steve Garmhausen

AI chatbots can make things awkward. Like when a client tells their financial advisor that ChatGPT or another chatbot disagrees with the advice they've been given. More and more, clients are turning to AI for a second opinion, and then presenting the result to their advisor. While it might be natural to react defensively, smart advisors are trying to make lemonade out of the AI lemons. For this week's Barron's Advisor Big Q, we asked a panel of advisors what they say to clients who've turned to AI for financial advice.

Jennifer Pagliara Horton, financial advisor, CapWealth: I don't look at this as a negative; I'm trying to think of it as a very positive thing. Clients are wanting to know more and more, and these tools are available, so, let's play around with them. My first response to clients is always, thank you for engaging in the plan and wanting to know more about it. I had a client the other day who said, hey, I was talking to Claude and he told me to open an S corp, because that way I could just pass money through it and not pay taxes. We all know that's not true, so I said, well let's talk about that. That opens the portal to have a discussion and to explain where AI can get it wrong.

We ended up getting on a call with the client's CPA, which gave me a better collaboration with the CPA. And it made the client realize, OK, AI doesn't know everything, and we'd all have S corps if we could just pass money through it and not pay any taxes. So we helped him understand his tax situation better, and underlined that, hey, we do have your back. But the fact that clients are taking initiative and want to talk about it is a great thing because it shows they're invested in their future and they want to make sure they're doing everything right. If that opens the door to more conversations with us, I think only good can come from it.

Rick Nott, private wealth advisor, Angeles Wealth: It's happening pretty regularly at this point. I encourage it. There's a level of education that is required for the best level of advice, so I want my clients to be educated. AI is not always right, and part of the education is me showing them the value of my experience and education. My assumption is that there's going to be something wrong [with AI advice given to clients]. Sometimes it's in just the facts and figures and data. Other times it's in the context in which the information is being queried or asked.

There's an ongoing fear or dialog that artificial intelligence will replace a certain level of service professional. I think what it will do is require service professionals to elevate what truly is valuable to the clients they serve. And it's certainly not regurgitating data. The days of just putting together model portfolios for 1% were already numbered, and are even more so now. The services being provided by a wealth advisor are going to have to be at a higher caliber. So when you're doing a financial plan, are you talking about the estate plan, the tax plan, and some of the family dynamic issues and business issues? All of that goes along with stewarding wealth over time.

Adam Newman, managing partner, Burney Wealth Management: We welcome the engagement. When someone brings me an AI second opinion we love to look at it together. Then we're using that as a platform to pressure test it against everything we know about the client that the AI doesn't. Two days ago a client came into our office with a write up from ChatGPT on what to do with an old life insurance policy that had a big loan attached to it. It was making a recommendation that would have been really disadvantageous from a tax perspective.

That's kind of a pattern: It gets some of the details conceptually right, but the consequence is wrong. So when we have those conversations clients walk away with a better understanding of what they're paying us for. That gives us a platform that's sometimes even better than a review meeting to reinforce our value. The details are the easy part. AI can't make the judgment calls or manage the emotions behind a big decision. AI will give some tidbits that are absolutely right, and it's only going to get more accurate in that regard. But our job is to wrap everything together and understand the client, understand the non-data-driven pieces and what it all means for them. So the mantra we're repeating with clients as we're having these engagements with them is that the facts are checkable, but the judgment is our job.

Kyle Moore, founder and financial planner, Quarry Hill Advisors: We've had that happen a couple of times. We're really on the ball with every part of clients' financial plans, but sometimes they do want to get a second opinion.

I'd say AI is really good at identifying general concepts and opening the door to say, Roth conversions for retirees. One client told us AI had said that he should be thinking about doing that. We'd already addressed it four years earlier, but of course the client's not going to remember that. So we used it as a teaching opportunity. We love Roth conversions and will recommend them in appropriate situations. But this client had a big brokerage account, and the projected required minimum distributions were going to be a lot lower than their withdrawal need, so Roth conversions didn't make a whole lot of sense for them. So it was an opportunity to show the client that, hey, we've looked at your entire situation, we've projected out what's going to happen in the future with your RMDs, and you are not a candidate.

I actually love AI. I think it's separating the really good advisors and advisory firms from those who are just going through the motions or operating in an old business model. We get a lot of new clients through AI search for that reason.

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June 17, 2026 15:51 ET (19:51 GMT)

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