This Week in Brief

Two threads run through this week’s stories: how AI is changing the way clients find advisers in the first place, and how quickly firms should act on the Mills Review’s recommendations. New research suggests most established advice firms are effectively invisible when consumers ask AI tools for a shortlist, FE Fundinfo pushed a live AI assistant out to over 1,000 advisers, and two technology leaders published opposing views on whether AI-driven change in pensions and advice can wait until 2030.

Key Developments

Most Top UK Advice Firms Are Invisible in AI Search Answers

Research from AI specialist Studio Baggio found that 93 of the UK’s top 150 financial advice firms were never named or cited when OpenAI, Gemini and Perplexity were asked 450 questions about finding and choosing an adviser. Answers leaned heavily on a small handful of sources — Unbiased, MoneyHelper, VouchedFor, the FCA and a single commercial “best advisers” listicle — meaning a firm’s visibility to prospective clients may now depend as much on being cited by these intermediaries as on its own website. For firms that assume good SEO is enough, this is a signal that AI-search visibility is a distinct, largely unmanaged risk. (FT Adviser, 13 August 2026)

FE Fundinfo Launches Nexus Assistant to 1,000+ Advisers

FE Fundinfo has switched on Nexus Assistant, an AI tool within its Nexus for Financial Advisers platform that preps advisers ahead of client meetings, captures and structures the conversation, and turns it into record updates and follow-up actions. The firm says AI-generated suitability reports are coming this autumn, with outputs attributed to source and adviser actions kept auditable — a design choice aimed squarely at Consumer Duty evidencing rather than just time-saving. (Professional Adviser, 13 August 2026)

GBST’s Rob DeDominicis: Don’t Wait Until 2030 for AI to Pay Off

Responding to the Mills Review, GBST chief executive Rob DeDominicis argued firms are conflating two very different things: open-ended AI decision-making, which is genuinely years away in a regulated market, and bounded, task-specific AI (like automating pension transfer checks) which already works today. His point for advisers: don’t let caution about the harder, higher-risk end of AI hold back safe automation that could be cutting admin time now. Update: this is a direct response to the Mills Review covered in previous digests, this time challenging its 2030 framing rather than its market-power warnings. (Professional Adviser, 14 August 2026)

PensionBee’s Jonathan Lister Parsons: The AI Interface Is Already the Battleground

Writing on the Mills Review and the government’s Financial Services AI Adoption Plan, PensionBee’s chief technology officer highlighted that nearly a third of people who shopped for pensions or investments in the past year already used AI to help — without waiting for any regulatory green light. He flags “hyper-switching” (AI agents comparing and moving consumers between providers) as a coming challenge for firms that rely on client inertia, and warns that AI tools optimising purely on price and features risk sidelining the two Consumer Duty outcomes — consumer understanding and support quality — that are harder to reduce to data. (Professional Adviser, 13 August 2026)

From the Trade Press

  • CII warns of a “critical AI fluency gap” — A Chartered Insurance Institute report says boards, risk functions and client-facing staff need training that goes beyond basic tool use, so they can question AI outputs rather than defer to them. FT Adviser, 11 August 2026
  • AI adoption among UK advisers jumps from 43% to 74% in a year — Intelliflo’s 2026 UK Advice Efficiency report found note-taking and transcription remain the most common use (87% of adopters), followed by report writing (44%), with admin relief cited as the main driver.

What to Watch

Keep an eye on whether firms start actively auditing and managing how they appear in AI-generated answers, given how concentrated the current source list is. Also worth tracking: the Mills Review’s recommendation to scale up the FCA’s AI Lab and clarify the boundary between advice and guidance for AI-enabled tools — a different strand of the review from the SM&CR accountability guidance flagged in previous digests, and one that will shape how much regulated firms can personalise AI-assisted guidance before it tips into advice.

Sources: FT Adviser, Professional Adviser, web search. Compiled 14 August 2026.