Jun 24, 2026
AI is taking over aspects of our health care, our jobs, and increasingly, our investments as financial institutions automate customer service, fraud detection, forecasting and portfolio management.
But, while software platforms position their programs as complements to human professionals — helping with risk management, data analysis, and trend identification/prediction — companies may soon be reserving their mortal staff for only their wealthiest clients, relegating the rest to AI support.
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At least, that’s what Debasish Patnaik, senior partner McKinsey & Co., has gone viral for implying this week.
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Speaking of wealth management customers with investments ranging from $100,000 to $1 million, Patnaik stated in an interview with Bloomberg that “The mass-affluent client now gets something close to private-banking quality from AI,” while advisors tend to the needs of higher net worth groups.
It’s a shift that is now “fundamentally changing” how candidates are selected in the sector, he said, as the demand for someone who can offer standardized advice suitable for the everyday consumer takes a back seat to the demand for someone who can provide highly customized, personal attention for a certain clientele; or, as Bloomberg puts it, who can meet the “emotional needs of the truly rich.”
Though McKinsey itself doesn’t deal with individual retail banking customers, it does advise the nation’s top financial institutions and shape how they serve their users.
AI may already be managing your money
While it’s nearly impossible to determine the degree to which algorithms may be dictating where your money goes, it’s almost guaranteed that even if you aren’t one of the many who use AI directly to make financial management decisions, artificial intelligence has some role behind the scenes, as AI adoption across the industry is high (and rising).
Active ETFs that are entirely run by AI may represent a very small portion of the landscape, but the majority of asset managers have been using tech in their work for years, at the very least for research to inform strategy.
As much as AI advocates want to see the tech as a panacea for human error, though, it has actually been shown to underperform in the realm of wealth management (even worse than active funds generally, which almost always fall behind passive funds over time).
Globally, analyses have found that funds utilizing AI for investment strategies “have not delivered significantly higher or lower performance and have had mixed success among investors.”
As one set of researchers wrote in a paper about using algorithms in the stock market: “While [AI programs] can find statistical patterns, they cannot judge whether these patterns are reasonable or meaningless. Only when AI algorithms can understand the meaning of words and their relationship with the real world will they become reliable in important decisions, including investments.”
Some argue, though, that with the breakneck speed of AI development, language models like ChatGPT have already started to “encode something like the causal constraints of the real world… in a way that is predictive of human judgments of these categories,” and thus may eventually be able to outperform humans.
For now, though, experts aren’t convinced that algorithms can autonomously handle portfolios more successfully than workers with distinctively human “soft” skills working with AI-powered tools — at least not just yet, even if executives at firms like McKinsey are suggesting otherwise.
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Becky Robertson is a senior staff reporter at Moneywise and a lifelong writer. Along with more than a decade covering news at outlets like blogTO and Quill & Quire, she's attended writing residencies around the world. With 33 countries visited, she finds travel to be among her greatest inspirations.
