Kitces and Carl - Real Talk for Real Financial Advisors
May 14, 2026 · 32 min · 16 segments
In the 190th episode of Kitces and Carl, Michael Kitces and client communication expert Carl Richards discuss how artificial intelligence could reshape the industry—and why one possible outcome may…
Michael KitcesHostCarl RichardsHost
So now we seem to largely be past the AI's gonna replace all the financial advisors.
Now, like, now, now it's a tool to make us better and more efficient, and then we can, like, handle more clients, and then we won't have a talent shortage because we'll finally have enough advisors to serve all the clients who we wanna serve, and then it brings the prices down, and we can serve more people, which we can do because we're more efficient.
Like, yes, I would, I would love to see advice expand and reach more, and there are very real challenges about what it costs and how that limits people's ability to afford it for large swaths of the population.
If you sort of follow the, the logic chain to this, right, which is something to the effect of AI makes us more efficient in the back office and the middle office so that we have all this additional capacity for clients, and we can serve a lot more of them and do it more cost efficiently, then we get all these great outcomes of expanding reach of advice.
We solve our, our, our, quote-unquote, "talent shortage" for the industry, 'cause we can just serve so many more clients with what we've got now.
And because this is where my brain goes when I like doing, you know, sort of fu- futurism thought experiments, as it were, uh, when I start following down that path, I don't actually like all the outcomes that I start finding.
Like, there's, you know, the first order effect, it gets simpler, we get faster, more efficient, we help more people.
So now we seem to largely be past the AI's gonna replace all the financial advisors.
Now, like, now, now it's a tool to make us better and more efficient, and then we can, like, handle more clients, and then we won't have a talent shortage because we'll finally have enough advisors to serve all the clients who we wanna serve, and then it brings the prices down, and we can serve more people, which we can do because we're more efficient.
Like, yes, I would, I would love to see advice expand and reach more, and there are very real challenges about what it costs and how that limits people's ability to afford it for large swaths of the population.
If you sort of follow the, the logic chain to this, right, which is something to the effect of AI makes us more efficient in the back office and the middle office so that we have all this additional capacity for clients, and we can serve a lot more of them and do it more cost efficiently, then we get all these great outcomes of expanding reach of advice.
We solve our, our, our, quote-unquote, "talent shortage" for the industry, 'cause we can just serve so many more clients with what we've got now.
And because this is where my brain goes when I like doing, you know, sort of fu- futurism thought experiments, as it were, uh, when I start following down that path, I don't actually like all the outcomes that I start finding.
Like, there's, you know, the first order effect, it gets simpler, we get faster, more efficient, we help more people.
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