The AI slop grenade has landed

Episode 106: AI, inheritance tax, and the question nobody asked

Something happened recently that every adviser in the country needs to think about.

A financial adviser, a good one, received a pre-meeting email from a client. Not a simple 'can we discuss my pension' email. 

A 14-point interrogation: percentage success rates on spending glide paths, year-by-year cash flow breakdowns, yield curve analysis, a request for every fee aggregated in pounds, pence, and percentage across every account. The works.

The client is not particularly money-savvy. The questions were not theirs.

AI wrote them.

We are calling this the AI slop grenade. A client feeds your advice, your recommendations, your relationship into a supercomputer, and out comes a list of questions they would never have thought to ask in a million years. 

Then it lands in your inbox at 9 pm on a Tuesday.

This is not a future problem. It is here now.

The right response is not panic.

The adviser in question went through what Andy described as the full circle of grief: anger, disbelief, acceptance. Then he sent back a single line: 'Great, looking forward to the meeting.' 

He did not answer a single point. The client came in as himself, not as the AI, and the meeting was fine.

That is one approach. Nick's is slightly more direct: he will not answer questions from a third party. If it is clearly not the client asking, it does not get a response. The relationship is with the human, not the machine.

Carl's read is different. Most long-standing clients will not do this. The trust is already built. Where it will hit hardest is new clients, prospects still kicking the tyres, and adult children of elderly clients who have decided, without much evidence, that Dad's adviser has been taking the mick for years.

Andy made the sharpest point: an investment-only adviser whose work gets fed into an AI system is going to get absolutely outgunned. 

The AI will ask whether there is a cash flow forecast. Whether the plan maps out the client's life. Whether the fees are justified by proper financial planning or just by inertia. 

Every road, as Andy put it, leads to full-fat financial planning.

If you are doing the real work, you have nothing to fear. If you are not, this is the moment that becomes obvious.

Elsewhere in episode 106

We covered a lot of ground this week.

The Titan Wealth story raised serious concerns. According to reports in the trade press, advisers at the PE-backed consolidator are being offered bonuses of up to £14,000 for moving client assets onto in-house investment portfolios, provided at least 70% of client households convert. 

The same investment manager has a documented history of bottom-decile fund performance following a legal dispute with Tavistock. The conflict of interest writes itself.

On LISAs: Nick walked through the numbers from a recent Citywire article. In 2025, just under 100,000 people used their Lifetime ISA to buy a first property. Good. But 154,000 cashed in and paid the penalty. Less good. 

The penalty structure means that if you put in £4,000, receive the £1,000 government top-up, and then withdraw, you leave with £3,750. If your money was sitting in cash, which it is for 70 to 80% of LISA holders according to data from providers including Nutmeg and Hargreaves Lansdown, you are likely worse off in nominal terms and certainly worse off in real terms.

On inheritance tax: we pointed listeners to a new study from Dan Neidle at Tax Policy Associates (link in the show notes). Currently just under 5% of estates pay IHT. From April 2027, retirement households liable for IHT could rise to around 20%. In some constituencies, the figure is far higher: St Albans sits at 44%. 

For most advised clients, the number is close to 100%. The planning window is open. It will not stay open.

On Anthropic and Claude: the company is building an end-to-end AI platform for financial advisers, with Vanguard, BlackRock, and Ritholtz among the early partners. The headline from Anthropic's own messaging is that the value of advice comes from the adviser. The AI handles the administration. The human delivers the relationship. That is either very reassuring or a reason to make sure you are genuinely delivering the relationship.

The thread running through all of it

Do the real work. Build real relationships. Charge fair fees for genuine planning. Everything else is just noise.

Watch or listnet to the full episode here:

Audio | Video 

P.S. When the AI grenade lands, your answer is already written in the quality of what you have done.