What Will Advisors Actually Do in 2030?

AI, Niches, and Job Maps

In 2010, I made what felt like a super risky decision: I rebranded my firm as Dentist Advisors. Back then, narrowing my target market felt like walking away from too much opportunity.

Fast forward to 2025, and I now think the opposite is true. The real risk in financial advice isn’t specializing—it’s staying general. And that’s not a branding opinion. It’s a market reality shaped by AI, psychology, and consumer demand behavior. Let me explain.

You’ll Never Reach 50% of Humans

Rough truth: half of Americans are never going to hire and pay for a technically-saavy financial advisor. This was true in 2024, and it’s most definitely true in 2025. Not because they don’t need help—but because the act of exposing your financial life to another human is deeply uncomfortable.

There’s shame, fear, distrust. And that’s upstream from anything you say or do in a meeting. The industry’s trust meter is declining with the rise in generative AI. So as you think about your opportunity set right now. Cut it in half.

Now take the remaining half—and split that again.

Two Psychological Archetypes for Advice:

1. “You Do It” Clients

This is the legacy model. Delegators. Outsourcers. They want to offload. They say:

“Just take care of it. I don’t want to think about it.”

This client used to be the backbone of the industry. They needed help because the barriers to entry were high: information was gated, technology was clunky, and regulation made everything harder. These barriers created an environment where higher fees were commonplace—charging 1% was relatively easy.

I’d encourage you to think about this segment of the market as 25%, ROUGHLY, and shrinking. It’s a slightly higher percentage of people Ages 55+, and lower percentage of 35 yo clients.

2. “Help Me Do It” Clients

This is the emerging model. Collaborators. Validators. They say:

“I want help—but I still want to be part of the process.”

This group is growing fast. They’re tech-native, self-directed, and emotionally overwhelmed. They don’t want full control, but they don’t want to be left out either. What they’re looking for is partnership—not delegation. We really haven’t figure out how to monetize this market—our current systems and service delivery wasn’t designed for this group.

Think about this market as roughly 25%, historically, and GROWING.

AI is Rewiring the Financial Advice Job Map

I think of advice in five stages:

1. Data Collection

2. Data Analysis

3. Decision-Making

4. Implementation

5. Ongoing Monitoring

Stages 1 and 2? AI, better software design, and platforms will eventually own them.

Stage 4? Getting closer but still has a lot of opportunity for specialist, niche advisors to assist with the most important and most valuable aspects of the FA Advice Job Map.

Stage 5? AI and automation will be able to gobble up this set of jobs over time, but not until 1, and 2 are really stable and thriving.

That leaves one job where humans are still clearly better, perhaps not indefinitely, but for a longer period of time, especially for those who are in the group of “help me do it.”

Stage 3 – Decision-making.

This is where advisors who know their niche—and know their people—win. Not because they know more, but because they’ve seen the patterns and simply have more advantages. They can spot emotional risk, resistance, timing, and complexity in ways tech can’t. They can reflect back issues, and create experiences, human to human, that a large subset of the population simply prefers to have with a human being.

Why Niches Are Defensible

Here’s something I’ve learned the hard way: you can’t just say you serve a niche. You have to live in it. You have to internalize their fears, their seasonality, their burnouts, their blindspots.

If you’ve ever helped a hundred dentists make a hiring decision, or talked five hundred practice owners off the ledge during a tax season, you don’t just “know finance”—you know them.

Your ability to make decisions, that are broadly informed by data, emotional and functional jobs decision making for an occupational vertical. Niches are cities, or regions, or industries. Niches are occupations, jobs, careers. And the narrower you can define them, the better.

That’s the value AI can’t replicate. I think there is still a lot of opportunity in this stage, not just now, but in the future. This “decision-making” segment of the advice job map will expand over time, touching more jobs, and more topics, where money is at the intersection.

So What Happens Now?

“You Do It” clients aren’t disappearing—but they’re becoming less dominant.

“Help Me Do It” clients are rising—and they’re harder to serve unless you’re built for it. I think this is where advisors using Elements are really thriving (expanding their influence today, and preparing for this shift). B2B financial wellness, financial coaching models, new segments of customers, etc. Advisors who continue to fight this trend, instead of adopting another service model, will continue to see pressure on their sales conversion rates, # of new customer growth rates, and rely more heavily on net-new assets from existing relationships—in other words—they will slowly shrink as competition rises, and technology compresses stages 1, and 2 of the job map I discussed above.

As advisors shift from less analysis and data collection towards more empathy, reflection, pattern recognition, and decision making (Stage 3), they will thrive, especially within narrowly positioned verticals.

If you’re wondering where the advice industry is headed—this is it. It’s not about what you know. It’s about how well you know the person sitting across from you, and how comprehensively you can help them make a handful of critical, BIG, decisions at precisely the right time, as frictionless as possible.

Final Thought:

If you’re feeling this shift in your own practice, or experimenting with new ways to work with clients in Stage 3—send me a message or comment below. I’m trying to map what the next version of this profession looks like, and I’m always open to sharing notes. Call me out on things you disagree with, or highlight an area where we agree! Cheers, and have a nice weekend.