A young investor today wakes up to a TikTok video on private credit, asks a generative AI tool to draft a retirement plan over breakfast, scrolls through podcasts comparing crypto custodians on the commute and fields a robo-adviser‘s portfolio recommendation before lunch.
Information about money has never been cheaper to produce, easier to access or harder to evaluate. However, despite the ubiquity of investment information, human advisers remain the single most trusted source of guidance for young investors today.
The role of traditional investment advice in an age of digital communication is a central tension in the new Next-Gen Investors report from CFA Institute, which draws from a survey of more than 2,400 mass-affluent and high-net-worth investors in six major wealth markets around the world.
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Instead of reading this as nostalgia for a fading model, consider how trust works in a saturated information environment. When advice is everywhere, the question is no longer who has the answer, but who can be trusted to guide choices among many possible answers.
Younger clients are looking for a curator and collaborator, and the advisers who recognize that will own the next generation of relationships.
How advisers can stay relevant
What makes young investors different is how they verify trust. Older investors tended to define trustworthiness primarily through the relationship itself, with years of personal history, in-person meetings, and continuity across family generations. Gen Z and Millennial investors still want that personability, but they expect it alongside measurable, professional indicators.
Our research shows young investors place greater weight on professional credentials, transparency around conflicts of interest, data security and verifiable performance against benchmarks.
These markers are particularly valuable in a world ripe with mass-produced AI advice. Professional credentials, for example, are one of the few public proofs that a person, not a machine, has demonstrated domain knowledge and expertise.
This measurable trust is what advisers can lean into to stay relevant. In our survey, approximately one third of Gen Z and Millennials already use generative AI to learn about investing. Generative tools will keep getting better at producing fluent-sounding advice, but fluency is not judgment.
Cut through the hype
Seasoned advisers bring years of seeing market cycles, regulatory changes, behavioral patterns and the outcomes of decisions that looked obvious at the time. That experience is exactly what cuts through hype. An AI tool may produce responses that sound confident, but it cannot replace competence.
For advisers, this reframes the scope of their work. Professionals are no longer the primary gatekeeper for investing. Clients now have access to an abundance of information. Instead, the job is to serve as a curator, validator and translator of an overwhelming digital landscape.
In some ways, that is a more demanding role, yet a more durable one. It means being fluent in the latest products your clients are reading about, including the ones you would not personally recommend, so you can have an informed conversation rather than a defensive one, and being ready to interpret a viral video or an output a client copied out of a chatbot.
Younger clients are not going to stop consuming content, but they want an expert whose true value lies in human judgment.
Communicating that value is now part of the job. Younger clients will not assume seasoned judgment is in the room but will look for evidence of it.
Treat credentials, professional experience and past performance as strategic assets that are clearly communicated to current and future clients.
Document conflict-of-interest policies in plain language and make them client-readable.
Show the work behind a recommendation, including supporting evidence, not just the conclusion.
At the same time, AI can be a useful tool to communicate the value proposition of adviser judgement. Used well, it removes the friction that prevents advisers from being successful curators and collaborators.
AI can help with drafting first-pass communications, summarizing trends, preparing for meetings and scaling personalized check-ins.
Nearly 70% of Gen Z and Millennial investors in our study who use a paid financial professional interact with their adviser at least monthly. That cadence is difficult to sustain without technology, but underlying those interactions is the adviser’s expertise and judgment orchestrating those communications.
Voice of reason
But the deeper reason younger clients want a human adviser is that the world has become a noisy place, and navigating the signals and products can be overwhelming and lead to rash decision-making.
Over half of Gen Z and Millennial investors in our research have already made at least one investment driven purely by fear of missing out (FOMO), most often in cryptocurrency.
As markets continue to show volatility, and as new investment opportunities emerge, the adviser’s role is to be the person on the other end of the line when the next market dip arrives, the next can’t-miss asset surfaces, or the noise of information gets too loud.
The point is not to chase every trend or reflexively dismiss new products or opportunities, but to be a voice of reason and stability. A credentialed, experienced professional who can keep clients aligned to their long-term goals and strategies; steadfastness becomes even more valuable in a noisy environment.
The advisers and firms who successfully adapt to the next generation will not approach AI as a threat, nor as a replacement for the adviser-client relationship.
They will be the ones who use technology to amplify their reach, and focus on their human qualities of judgment, accountability, ethical stewardship and demonstrated experience, which no algorithm can fully capture.
Genevieve Hayman, PhD, and Ryan Munson are co-authors of the CFA Institute Research and Policy Center report Next-Gen Investors: A Guide for Wealth Managers and Financial Advisers.
Genevieve Hayman is a senior manager of macrosystems and foresight at CFA Institute. Her research focuses on pensions and retirement security, complex systems, cognitive science and the long-term forces shaping global finance. In her role, she develops structured, long-horizon scenario frameworks that examine how technological, economic and regulatory shifts may reshape financial markets, institutional behavior and professional norms. She also contributes to early-warning frameworks and cross-pillar integration across CFA Institute’s research agenda.
Ryan Munson is a research manager at CFA Institute. His research focuses on pensions and the future of finance, exploring how extra-financial factors impact the investment industry and investment professionals. Ryan serves on the advisory board for the Mercer CFA Institute Global Pension Index. He is the author of several CFA Institute publications, including the Future State of the Investment Industry, the Future of Work in Investment Management series and the CFA Institute Investor Trust series.
