"Our 2026 Advice Efficiency Survey shows the advice profession has made up its mind on AI, with adoption jumping from 43% to 74% in a year. "
- Nick Eatock - intelliflo
The 2026 UK Advice Efficiency Survey by intelliflo has found that AI adoption has risen from 43% to 74% in the last year.
intelliflo says that the survey of 209 advice professionals also highlighted persistent operational challenges, with fragmented technology and poor integration continuing to drain firms’ resources and affect client outcomes.
AI usage within advice firms has risen by 31 percentage points in a year, from 43% in 2025 to 74% in 2026. According to intelliflo, firms are applying AI to manual administrative work rather than to advice itself. Among AI users, note-taking & transcription is the most common application at 87%, followed by report writing at 44%.
Report writing is the most time-intensive task for advisers, with 30% spending three or more hours and 10% spending over five hours per report.
Meanwhile, 60.7% of firms run five or more core systems and 57% run four or more investment platforms, with 68% citing manual data entry as their biggest challenge and 63% reporting poor system integration. Out of every 100 client cases, 38% see data errors in 11 or more, affecting service quality and increasing compliance risk.
The survey also found that 62% of advisers want near-complete digital workflows (81 to 100%), yet less than half (48%) currently have minimal paper use of 0 to 20%.
The top priorities for digitisation are system integration at 51%, digital signatures at 50% and online fact-finding at 48%.
In addition, the survey asked advice professionals to rate how efficient they believe current financial advice journey workflows are on a scale of one to ten, with one being not at all efficient and ten being extremely efficient. The average efficiency rating stands at 6.23 out of 10, with only a quarter of advisers rating their workflows as highly efficient (8+).
75% of advisers feel their current processes limit their ability to deliver good client outcomes to some degree, reflecting the gap between firms' digital aspirations and operational reality.
If more streamlined processes and improved efficiency freed up more of advisers’ time, 66% say they would serve more clients and 47% say they would focus on business development. Less than one in five (17%) would move to a four-day working week.
Nick Eatock, CEO of intelliflo, said: "Our 2026 Advice Efficiency Survey shows the advice profession has made up its mind on AI, with adoption jumping from 43% to 74% in a year. But firms are bolting these tools onto infrastructure that's already fragmented. Efficiency sits at just 6.23 out of 10, and three-quarters of advice professionals say their processes limit the client outcomes they can deliver.
"There's a clear business case for modern, integrated solutions, like wealthlink and intelliflo IQ, which put an end to rekeying the same client data again and again. Advisers told us they want to grow their client base and build their business. Done well, technology lets them do both."
