AI is here. This group wants to help financial planners prepare.
The Financial Planning Association is launching a portal, FPAi, that will serve as an AI content library for its members.
Like it or not, artificial intelligence is here to stay, and financial planners are going to have to start thinking about how they can use it to support their practices. The Financial Planning Association has some ideas.
Today, the FPA, whose members are Certified Financial Planners, is launching FPAi, a content library of resources such as blogs and videos to help advisors get more familiar with the technology.
The association is undertaking the AI project in partnership with Capital Investment Advisors, whose managing partner, Matt Reiner, is planning to speak about AI at all of the FPA’s 2026 conferences.
Reiner says he believes the advisory industry is already “fairly comfortable with AI in general," and that many practitioners are already using some kind of artificial intelligence in their personal or professional lives.
“I think much of the angst, as is to be expected and logical, comes from the data-privacy lens," he says. “And then you layer on top of that the fact that this is all moving so fast and there is minimal guidance as to how regulators are going to view AI utilization, and you have many people hesitant to really jump all in."
He says he expects that as regulatory guidance emerges, firms will begin to get comfortable with more advanced AI deployments. The FPA’s new content library aims to help with that effort.
Some of the materials will include product demonstrations and trending content from the AI industry. The FPA is also working with several fintech companies that will offer members discounted AI tools and services. An FPA representative says the content will at first be available to the general public, but over time access will be restricted to FPA members.
Adoption within the industry could be a mixed bag. Reiner suggests that successful advisors who have been working with the same individuals and families for decades might not see the need to invest heavily in new technology.
But he does see an opportunity for advisors, starting with the premise that “great advice has always been human, and AI should make it more so, not less," he says in a statement.
He also shares some caveats with Barron’s Advisor, including the caution for advisors not to believe everything that a large language model produces and not to feed clients’ personally identifiable information into an AI program.
Reiner recommends advisors should think of AI as an “amazing augmented assistant that allows you to do more of what you are best at or want to do," but also to acknowledge its limitations.
“A main trap, in thinking, is that AI can do everything," he says. “AI is a great tool, likely one of the most impactful tools and innovations to be created in our lifetime, but it is still a tool."
Reiner also stresses the importance of context in consulting with a large language model or other AI deployment. Leaving context out of a prompt invites the AI program to fill in the blanks, which can produce the “hallucinations" that still bedevil the technology.
“To be honest, it is not much different than if we are working with another human and leave out a bunch of context that is necessary for a successful completion of a task," Reiner says. “They come back with a completely incorrect output and we tell them they are wrong."
Write to advisor.editors@barrons.com
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