Adviser development: what an AI simulation can and cannot teach

The profession has spent five years arguing about how to attract people into financial advice. The more awkward question is what happens after someone says yes.

A new entrant arrives holding an approved degree and then meets the Professional Year. That means 1,600 hours of work and training, at least 100 of them structured, an exam to pass before the third quarter begins and a supervisor whose own client book carries on regardless.

Every hour spent teaching costs that supervisor billable time. That trade-off explains a fair amount about why the pipeline stays thin.

The Stockbrokers and Investment Advisers Association (SIAA) launched its response on 17 August. The Developing Adviser Resource Toolkit, or DART, pairs written guidance with AI-driven simulations that let early-career advisers practise client interviews and work through ethical dilemmas before they face either across a real desk.

“The future of Australia’s investment advice profession depends on attracting, developing and supporting emerging advisers,” SIAA chief executive Maria Lykouras said.

The supply picture behind the launch

Padua WealthData counted 15,146 advisers on the Financial Adviser Register in late August. That base formed after more than 10,000 practitioners left in the years following the Hayne royal commission. The Padua WealthData projection has the profession settling at a median 14,796 by 2030, with a lower bound of 13,845, and SIAA cites the same research forecasting fewer than 15,000 by that date.

The flow figures matter more than the stock. The same data set recorded 573 new entrants across 2025 and 435 provisional advisers in the pipeline, and the profession has added a net 91 advisers across 2026 to late August, against a loss of 77 at the same point last year.

Set that against a profession of roughly 15,000 with an ageing membership, and the replacement rate looks slim. Attracting candidates is only half the problem. Turning them into advisers who can hold a first client meeting without a supervisor in the room is where the profession loses time.

Rehearsal before the real client

DART runs two kinds of simulation. The first presents ethical dilemmas and responds to the user’s reasoning with immediate feedback. The second stages client interviews, so a developing adviser can practise fact-finding, strategy development and client engagement.

Participants keep detailed feedback and transcripts, which they can pass to a supervisor as evidence of what they have worked on.

That last feature carries more weight than it first appears. Professional Year supervision produces surprisingly little documentation of how a trainee thinks. A transcript of someone working through a scenario shows the reasoning, not only the outcome, and gives a supervisor something specific to correct.

SIAA developed the toolkit in consultation with compliance leaders, training managers and heads of advice. According to Lykouras, it complements workplace learning rather than replacing it, giving developing advisers room to test their thinking and refine their skills against immediate feedback.

“While formal education provides an important foundation, developing advisers also need opportunities to apply their knowledge and gain experience in realistic professional scenarios.”

Where the hours land

The toolkit carries roughly 30 hours of structured learning, and SIAA says half of that counts towards legislated CPD. Fifteen hours against an annual obligation of 40 is a meaningful share of a CPD year, and the categories it targets are the awkward ones to fill.

Advisers must complete at least nine hours a year in professionalism and ethics and five in client care and practice. Both categories tend to attract webinars, because scenario-based material is expensive to build. Ethical dilemma simulations and practice client interviews speak to exactly those two requirements.

The picture differs for advisers still in their Professional Year. Provisional relevant providers in their third and fourth quarters do not have to meet the minister’s CPD standard at all. They complete structured training instead, as part of the 100 hours the Professional Year demands.

Whether DART hours count towards that 100 remains a call for the licensee, and advisers should confirm it before they subscribe.

Career changers get a shorter runway

SIAA also aims the toolkit at people moving into advice from other professions, a cohort that arrives with client skills and commercial experience but no exposure to the advice process itself.

“It’s also designed to support professionals entering financial advice from other fields, helping them apply their existing experience while accelerating their development as advisers,” Lykouras said.

That group has grown. Accountants, lawyers and private bankers who already hold the client relationship usually find the advice-specific mechanics the slowest part to learn. The fact-find, the scoping conversation, the best interests duty documentation.

What a simulation will not rehearse

Simulated clients behave in ways real ones do not. A client understates a debt out of embarrassment, and another names a beneficiary and then changes the subject.

The skill an adviser needs is noticing the silence, and a model trained to score responses tends to reward the articulate answers instead. An adviser who learns to sound composed has learnt something narrower than judgement.

Ethics behaves the same way. The Code of Ethics breaches that end up in front of a regulator rarely announce themselves as dilemmas. They arrive as a busy Friday, a client in a hurry and a form that would be quicker to complete than to question. A scenario labelled “ethical dilemma” has already given away the answer to the hardest part.

Those limits describe the conditions the toolkit works best in rather than reasons to skip it. A scenario library only teaches what its authors thought to write into it, and a transcript only teaches when a supervisor reads it as teaching material instead of filing it as evidence.

DART is available to SIAA members and affiliates on an 18-month subscription.

The profession has argued for years that it cannot find enough people. The harder work has always been what happens in the twelve months after it does, and that work has never had many tools attached to it. The test for this one is whether the advisers who come out the other side hold a better first meeting.