Over the past month I travelled to Cairns, Perth, Sydney and Melbourne speaking with advisers, paraplanners, licensees and practice owners about AI and the future of financial advice.

I expected most conversations to focus on technology.

Instead, they focused on rework.

The adviser in Cairns talked about administration consuming more time than client work. A licensee in Sydney discussed the challenge of maintaining consistency across advice teams. A practice owner in Melbourne wanted to grow without continually adding staff. In Perth, a paraplanner described spending more time clarifying advice than actually producing it.

Different businesses. Different roles. The same underlying problem.

Too much effort is spent moving information through the advice process.

A client meeting becomes a file note. The file note becomes a paraplanning request. The paraplanning request becomes an advice document. The advice document goes through review, amendment and clarification.

At every step, information is interpreted, rewritten and checked again.

None of this is new. It has existed in advice businesses for years. What surprised me was how often discussions about AI eventually returned to this issue.

Most firms are not looking for AI for its own sake. They are looking for ways to reduce friction.

That distinction matters because much of the current conversation around AI focuses on what the technology can generate. Can it write a file note? Can it draft a Record of Advice? Can it create a Statement of Advice?

These are impressive capabilities, but they do not automatically solve the operational challenges facing advice businesses.

In many cases, AI is being asked to solve problems that existed long before AI arrived. Poor handovers, duplicated effort, inconsistent documentation and disconnected workflows are not technology problems. They are process problems.

The reason this resonates with me is that it mirrors the journey we have been on ourselves.

When we developed Meeting Ally, we started with file notes because that was an obvious pain point. What we discovered, however, was that the real value wasn't in summarising meetings. It was in understanding them. Once you understand the objectives, recommendations and scope discussed during a meeting, you can start removing work from the stages that follow.

That realisation led us towards paraplanning requests, advice production and workflow automation. Not because we were trying to build more AI, but because we were trying to reduce rework.

The more conversations I had around the country, the more convinced I became that this is where the real opportunity lies.

Generating content is becoming easier. Generating consistency remains difficult.

And for businesses trying to scale, consistency is often more valuable than speed.

After four weeks on the road, my biggest takeaway is that the advice industry doesn't have an AI problem.

It has a rework problem.

The firms that succeed over the next decade won't necessarily be those with the most advanced AI. They will be the firms that use technology to eliminate friction, reduce rework and create advice processes that can genuinely scale.