26/05/2026
I read with some interest, that an illuminated drone show at Sydney’s Vivid Festival has been cancelled, following a ‘malfunction’ which saw 89 ( yes, eighty nine ) individual drones fall from the sky during a performance the other evening.
Fortunately, nobody was hurt, nobody was injured and nobody was killed.
But it got me thinking about the use of AI to produce something ‘spectacular’, especially in my industry.
We all know there is a push to move AI into the financial planning space. We are told it will make things easier, it will be able to write documents and even provide the advice.
So let’s take the Vivid experience of the other night, and overlay it into what I do for a living.
Let’s say your entire financial future is now crafted by AI, and your financial planner becomes nothing more than the messenger for the shiny new computer program. So much for thirty-something years of experience, but that’s another discussion.
AI builds your portfolios, and monitors them for you. The initial results are pretty, carefully constructed and things seem to be chugging along well … until suddenly and without warning, eighty nine of your allocated investments fall from the sky, crashing and burning.
I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty sure “oops” is not going to be an acceptable response, when I’m asked about what happened. “I don’t know, it was an AI thing” probably won’t work either.
At least when I’m doing my research, and crafting my clients investment strategies, I can draw on my many years of experience to create something that history tells me, won’t unexpectedly fall out of the sky and wipe away your life’s financial work.
It also means that I have to continually research my information, analyzing and updating the data to continue to allow intelligent decisions to be made.
I have been called a dinosaur many times, because of my attitudes to financial planning and investment management.
I am very happy to live with that.
I know there are no guarantees when it comes to long term investment, but there is some pretty extensive evidence that suggests my approach has worked well for over thirty years now.
Quite simply, don’t do dumb stuff with your clients money. Invest in what you can see, in what you can understand, and in what has a long term track record of success.
There will be ups and downs, yes, but nothing catastrophic provided you maintained some pretty solid investment principles.
I don’t want your finances to suffer from a “Vivid event”, because a few shiny lights … or the latest trendy must-have … became a distraction.
The more I hear and read about AI and the “oops” moments that get reported, the more I’m convinced that sometimes doing it the old fashioned way, works.
As long as I remain personally responsible for a clients finances, I think I’ll stay a dinosaur for a good while yet, and just keep relying on half a lifetime of doing this job properly.
I happen to think there is a lot of merit in being very proud of a job well done, especially when there has been an awful lot of effort put in.
