You would think financial advisors would have more time for their clients by now. After all, AI can draft emails, summarize meetings, and help with research. But a new Morningstar survey suggests that adopting these tools doesn’t automatically fix an overloaded workday.
According to its latest Investor Perspectives for Advisors report, 80 percent of surveyed US advisors now use AI, up from 67 percent in 2025. Despite that adoption, 56 percent say administrative or operational work is their top barrier to providing the advice and service they would like to deliver.
To be fair, plenty of advisors report benefits. Forty-eight percent say AI has moderately or substantially improved their efficiency, compared with 36 percent last year. So this isn’t evidence that the technology does nothing. It shows that getting some tasks done faster and having enough time for clients are two different outcomes.
Advisors currently spend 53 percent of their time on client-focused activities, but would prefer to spend 63 percent. That amounts to roughly four additional hours in a 40-hour workweek. Nearly two-thirds, or 62 percent, would like more time for this work.
Paperwork is an obvious target for improvement. When Morningstar asked what advisors would most like to remove from their workloads, 26 percent named administrative paperwork burdens. For companies selling AI productivity tools, that should be a useful place to prove their value.
The most common applications are fairly ordinary. Forty-three percent use AI for internal productivity, including meeting summaries and email drafts, while 36 percent use it for brainstorming. Research and due diligence follow at 35 percent, with client communications and messaging at 33 percent.
There is nothing wrong with those uses. Nobody needs to spend their afternoon manually assembling meeting notes if software can produce an accurate summary. However, the word “accurate” is doing some work here, particularly when someone’s money is involved.
An advisor still needs to review the output and decide whether it fits the client’s circumstances. Morningstar recommends clear review procedures and using AI to improve workflows while preserving human interaction. A polished email is useful, but the person sending it remains responsible for what it says.
Clients are also bringing AI into the conversation. During focus groups at Morningstar’s 2026 Investment Conference, advisors described people arriving with AI-generated notes and questions. That could lead to better discussions, although it could also mean spending part of a meeting correcting bad information.
More information doesn’t necessarily make someone a more confident investor. Thirty-six percent of advisors identify client behavior or emotional decision-making as a barrier to delivering advice. The problems include emotional reactions to market news, concerns about short-term volatility, and conflicting information from media or social media.
AI adds another source of answers to that mix. Some will be helpful, while others may sound convincing without accounting for the person asking the question. Explaining the difference becomes another job for the advisor.
Then there is the question of fees. Morningstar says investors may be less willing to pay the same rate for an advisor who uses AI as for one who does not, although the report’s discussion does not provide a percentage for that finding. I can understand why a client might ask what they are paying for if software handles more of the work.
Of course, financial advice involves more than producing documents. Advisors most often point to personalized service and responsiveness, along with long-term relationships and trust, as effective ways to justify their fees. Each accounts for 29 percent of responses, ahead of financial planning expertise at 14 percent and investment performance and portfolio outcomes at 13 percent.
Investment choices are getting more complicated, too. Forty percent of advisors now offer private market investments, up from 35 percent last year. Yet the share who feel comfortable explaining the private investments they offer has dropped from 68 percent to 61 percent.
Fees, limited liquidity, and a lack of transparency into underlying holdings are among the challenges. Those are subjects clients need someone to explain clearly, especially when an investment may be difficult to sell or evaluate.
Morningstar collected 501 online responses from US advisors between July 21 and August 16, 2026. These are self-reported experiences, so the survey cannot tell us exactly how many hours AI saves or what workloads would look like without it.
It is also worth considering who produced the research. Morningstar sells software to financial advisors and closes the report with a promotion for its Direct Advisory Suite. That commercial interest doesn’t invalidate the findings, but readers should have that context.
For me, the question is what clients actually gain from all this automation. If an advisor can finish routine work faster, that should create an opportunity for more personal attention. Otherwise, clients may reasonably wonder why everyone keeps talking about productivity while they are still waiting for a call back.
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