Caroline Duff, CEO at ammonite, says one of the biggest misconceptions surrounding AI is that it somehow diminishes the importance of the paraplanner. In this article, Caroline draws upon her many years of experience as a paraplanner, adviser and now AI business owner, to paint a very different picture – quite the opposite in fact, especially within paraplanning.
AI has dominated conversations across financial planning over the past two years. From conference stages to LinkedIn posts, we’ve all heard predictions about how AI will transform the profession, with some even suggesting that suitability reports will soon be generated at the click of a button.
For most paraplanners, however, the reality has been rather different. While tools such as ChatGPT and Claude can undoubtedly produce well-written text, anyone who has experimented with using them for client reports quickly discovers their limitations.
They don’t understand your firm’s structure, they won’t consistently follow your preferred wording, and they certainly don’t know the subtle differences between the way your advisers present recommendations compared with another firm.
What many firms have realised is that the challenge was never simply about getting AI to write a report. It was about preserving years of accumulated knowledge, client experience and carefully refined processes whilst removing as much of the repetitive work as possible.
Those are two very different problems.
One of the biggest misconceptions surrounding AI is that it somehow diminishes the importance of the paraplanner.
In practice, I believe the opposite is happening. As technology takes on more of the mechanical work involved in producing documentation, the value of the paraplanner increasingly lies in shaping how advice is delivered across the business.
Rather than being measured solely by the number of reports produced each week, paraplanners are becoming custodians of quality, consistency and technical excellence.
That shift is significant because every advice firm has developed its own way of communicating with clients. Some produce concise reports focused on recommendations and actions.
Others include extensive technical explanations, detailed cashflow analysis or bespoke wording for vulnerable clients.
Over time, these templates evolve through regulatory change, compliance feedback and the experience of individual paraplanners. They become one of the firm’s most valuable intellectual assets.
Unfortunately, generic AI knows nothing about any of that. Left to its own devices, it will generate something that is grammatically impressive but often lacks the consistency, structure and nuance that advisers expect.
Worse still, it can gradually erode the firm’s own identity by replacing carefully considered wording with something that simply sounds plausible.
That is why, at ammonite AI, we have always believed that firms should retain complete control over their templates.
AI should work within the framework that the business has created rather than asking firms to abandon years of development in favour of a generic report generated from a prompt.
At the same time, we recognised another challenge. Whilst many firms wanted complete control, not every business wanted to begin with a blank canvas.
Some firms have mature report suites that only require digitising, whilst others are looking to refresh documents that have evolved over many years.
Newer firms, meanwhile, may not yet have developed a comprehensive library of suitability reports and review templates.
This thinking has led us to introduce a new approach within our AI tool, Planbot. Alongside the ability to build entirely bespoke templates, we are developing a growing library of professionally designed, off-the-shelf templates covering many of the most common advice scenarios.
These templates are not intended to become a firm’s finished product. Instead, they provide a high-quality starting point that can be adapted to reflect the firm’s own language, branding, compliance requirements and approach to financial planning.
A paraplanning team might begin with one of these templates before adjusting the wording, changing the report structure, introducing firm-specific sections, refining the formatting or creating alternative versions for different client types.
Rather than spending weeks creating every report from first principles, firms can start from something proven and then shape it into something uniquely their own.
Perhaps the most interesting consequence of this approach is the way it changes the role of the paraplanner. Historically, a significant proportion of a paraplanner’s time has been devoted to producing individual documents.
Increasingly, however, I believe the greatest value lies in designing the system that produces those documents.
Questions such as how reports should be structured, which wording should remain fixed, where AI should have flexibility, how vulnerable client communications should differ and how templates should evolve over time become strategic decisions that influence every piece of advice the firm delivers.
In many respects, paraplanners become architects rather than builders. Instead of constructing each report from the ground up, they create and maintain the framework that enables high-quality reports to be produced consistently by the whole advice team.
Their technical expertise becomes embedded within the firm’s templates, benefiting advisers, administrators and future paraplanners alike.
This also offers significant advantages from a compliance perspective. Changes requested by compliance teams no longer need to be manually copied into dozens of separate Word documents.
Updates to legislation, new house style requirements or revised consumer duty wording can all be incorporated centrally, ensuring that future reports reflect the latest standards whilst maintaining consistency across the business.
None of this reduces the importance of technical expertise. If anything, it increases it. AI still requires someone to define what good advice communication looks like.
It needs experienced paraplanners to determine the structure of reports, decide which wording should remain fixed, identify where flexibility is appropriate and continually refine templates as regulation and best practice evolve. Technology can accelerate production, but it cannot replace judgement.
As our profession continues to adopt AI, I suspect that the firms which gain the greatest advantage will not be those using the most sophisticated language model.
They will be the firms that successfully combine technology with the knowledge and experience that already exists within their paraplanning teams.
The future of paraplanning is therefore unlikely to be defined by writing reports faster. Instead, it will be characterised by building better systems for delivering advice, embedding consistency across the business and ensuring that every client benefits from the collective expertise of the firm’s paraplanners.
AI will undoubtedly become an increasingly important tool in achieving that goal, but it is the people designing those systems who will ultimately determine the quality of the advice that clients receive.
Main image: AI, immo-wegmann-vi1HXPw6hyw-unsplash
