AI is a due diligence tool that investors have taken to like ducks to water, to assist relations with their advisors rather than negating them completely.
TL;DR: make your content legible for AI tools.
Even investors that use financial advisors cannot avoid the pull of AI tools to swiftly address all of their financial questions.
If you ask over 1,000 based in the US what they use AI for – which makes up three-quarters of respondents to a Betterment survey – it grants fund marketers’ an understanding into the thoughts investors may have before approaching a real person.
Just over half want to simply understand concepts, with an equal number researching specific investments using AI. 48% are trying to organise their approaches and intent before contacting their advisor.
Only a mere 3% would seek to completely replace advisors with AI. That is still a disconcerting view given the ‘human vs AI’ job discourse, albeit overshadowed by the fact that 76% continue to want a human advisor, armed with pre-chat AI research.
Perhaps unsurprisingly is how weighted AI usage is toward younger generations. 65% of Gen Z clients say their financial decisions are informed by AI. At the same time, an overwhelming 83% contact their advisor at least monthly.
The main finding is that this generation’s bar for quality content is extremely high, as it is for the digital ways in which it is wrapped and delivered to them. 63% say they would switch advisors due to a poor technology experience, for instance.
The intermediate layers that sit between a fund and their prospective LPs are more vital to securing engagement than ever, essentially.
So, what does this mean for fund marketers?
Investors’ AI use should be a normal expectation for fund marketers today. On the plus side, it could pose an advantage to those that make their communications readable for bots and humans alike.
This is because if an investor asks a chatbot (on a firm’s website, or AI Search tools) to “explain this fund’s strategy” or “summarise last quarter’s commentary,” the model is only working off of text that it can parse. Dense PDFs and text-less infographics can be paraphrased or flattened as a result.
An intermediary advisor, then, can misrepresent the content that is not under the fund’s marketing team’s control. Plenty of meaning, context and compliance measures get muddled all along the way.
Now that clarity is what gets rewarded, any investor-facing materials must be written in prose that is as clear and extractable as possible: terms should be defined, numbers made explicit, and summaries written in plain-language to aid a human’s understanding (and achieving compliance sign-off), all in a brand’s recognisable tone.
At the same time, text needs to be legible by AI models in order to accurately convey a fund’s message for any allocators that consult AI Search tools first.
Following what is already becoming an adage to live by, a human-AI hybrid mix is a recommended content strategy. Younger, AI-affluent segments of investors want quick and easy AI answers before reaching out to advisors they deem trustworthy, but the handoff between the two has to be a slick experience.
Marketers that embrace AI from their investors’ point-of-view will be better able to make such tools present them in a better light, perhaps capturing more prospective Gen Z investors as a result.
Source
Betterment, “2026 Advisory Survey Results”
