AI makes a strong advice brand more important, not less

There is no shortage of AI-generated content in financial services right now. AI can write your LinkedIn posts, draft your editorial, and build your content calendar.

What it cannot do is make someone trust you. And there is a real shortage of advice practices that know what they actually stand for.

Chris Tucker, creative director at Capital Outcomes, has built his career helping professional services firms navigate brand, positioning, and content strategy.

His argument on AI and advice marketing is worth understanding before your practice makes any decision about how it shows up digitally.

The two extremes

Chris frames the AI conversation around a spectrum.

“On one end, there’s the ultimate potential of AI building and doing everything for us,” he says. “And then on the other end, you’ve got this need for the analogue world that we all grew up with in terms of personal interaction, that personal experience, that trust.”

Most advice practices are sitting somewhere between those two poles without realising it, and it plays out in every content decision they make. Do you automate your LinkedIn posts or write them yourself? Use AI to draft client communications, or keep them personal? Build an avatar to deliver content at scale, or film yourself and post something honest and unscripted?

Both ends have a role. The practices that get this wrong are the ones that default entirely to one or the other.

Brand is the anchor point

Before a practice decides where to sit, Chris argues, it needs to get one thing right.

“Brand and positioning is your anchor point on everything.”

Get that wrong and nothing else lands. In a market where AI can generate content at volume and every practice can publish daily across every channel, the differentiator is no longer frequency. It is identity.

A practice that is clear about who it is, who it serves, and what it stands for can use AI to amplify that identity consistently. A practice that is not clear will use AI to produce more of something that does not connect.

The advice world has spent years debating whether to niche or cast the net wide. AI sharpens that debate. A vague brand becomes even more invisible as the volume of content rises. A sharp one becomes even more distinctive.

Authenticity beats polished

Ask Chris what performs best on digital channels and the answer runs against most advisers’ instincts.

“Whether you’re filming yourself and posting things because it’s real, honest, raw and pretty personal, that part of it will work,” he says.

That is a useful counterweight to the urge to make everything look produced before it goes out. The adviser who films two minutes on their phone walking through a real client concern, fees, market falls, whether to sell the family home, in plain language will often beat the firm that spent a week and an agency budget on a glossy brand reel.

Not because production doesn’t matter, but because prospective clients are not looking for perfection. They are looking for someone they can believe.

AI-generated content, used well, can support that. Chris’s team is currently exploring the role of avatars in delivering content at scale, particularly for practices that want a consistent presence across channels without the time commitment of constant filming.

But the personal, human moments remain the foundation. AI sits on top of that, not in place of it.

In a world of slop, clarity is everything

Chris points to a word gaining currency in content circles: slop. It describes AI-generated content that is technically competent but entirely without character, perspective, or point of view. Practices that outsource their whole content strategy to AI risk producing exactly that.

“There’s so much going on at speed, at pace, it’s hard to keep ahead of things,” Chris says. “There’s more importance on threading it all together with a coherent kind of plan and strategy first.”

The practices that use AI well are the ones that start with a clear strategy and treat AI as a tool within it. The ones that struggle are reaching for AI as a shortcut to having a strategy at all.

Strategy first, AI second

AI is not the brand strategy. It is a delivery mechanism for a brand strategy that already exists.

Before a practice decides which tools to use, it needs to be clear on the message those tools will carry.

In a market flooded with AI-generated content, a practice with a genuine point of view, and the clarity to express it consistently, has never had a more powerful competitive advantage.