Don't Learn AI, Learn to USE AI well.
A few months ago, I was having coffee at The Brown Moose (Great coffee if you're ever in St Kilda Rd Towers) with a colleague who is a BDM for hundreds of advisers. Our conversation turned to AI, and he asked if I was using it at all. I had been, I had been slowly putting together an internal document full of prompts that we could cut and paste into Copilot, ChatGPT etc depending on the type of work we were doing.
He said I was doing more than most advisers he came across.
That surprised me. I didn't think what I was doing was anything special. But as it turns out, most advisers using AI are using it as a better Google. Type a question, get an answer, move on.
In the months since, I have moved past my prompt bible. Projects and agents have replaced it. Not because the tools got better, though they have. Because I stopped hunting for the right words and started giving AI context. Treating it like a person I'd just hired, not a search bar. This made all the difference.
Everyone in this industry is talking about prompts, agents, the latest model, automation, which AI is best. Almost nobody is talking about judgement.
Almost three-quarters of Australian advice practices are using or planning to use AI, yet fewer than half of them have an AI policy or formal guidance governing its use.For a start, only three-quarters? really? What will happen to the other 25%?Secondly, with a new technology that gives us so much promise and so much risk, we need guardrails in place. If you don't have them, get them now.
We need to remember that technology is changing every month. Judgement doesn't.
I've been building a simple way to think about this. It's not finished, so bear with me.
I call it USE + Impact. Let me unpack my thoughts with you.
U = Understand
Understand what AI is. AI is a collaborator, not an oracle. It predicts the next word based on patterns. It doesn't know anything. That means it can be brilliant and occasionally confidently wrong.
Context is everything. AI can't read your mind. You're still the expert. AI contributes speed and breadth. You contribute judgement and accountability.
You may have heard of AI hallucinating. This is where it gives you an answer that is completely wrong, but it will give it to you confidently. AI doesn't replace your judgement. Understand what it is and what it isn't. Understand AI before you try to master it.
S = Speak
Stop prompting. Start speaking.
Google rewards keywords. AI rewards conversation. Talk to it the way you'd brief a trusted colleague. Tell it who you are, what you're trying to achieve, who it's for, why it matters. Then keep talking. Ask it to challenge you. Ask what you've missed. Argue the opposite.
Try this right now, while you're reading this. Open whatever AI you use. Turn on voice input and just talk.
Tell it who you are. Tell it what you're trying to achieve. Tell it who it's for. Then ask it to walk you through the steps to learn how to use it well, given everything you've just told it about your business and your clients.
You'll notice something immediately. It stops giving you generic advice and starts giving you a plan that fits you.
Clarity beats cleverness. You don't need prompt engineering. You need good communication.
Warning: A few rules to follow. Client data should never be put into an AI chatbot unless you know that it is protected. Copilot (paid) for example will keep the info within your organisation. The free versions of ChatGPT and Claude, won't.It is your responsibility to make sure data is safe.
This also applies to your business data, worth keeping in mind.
E = Expand
Here's where it's changed how I actually work. AI now writes my file notes, suggests strategies, prepares request forms for our paraplanner and checks over my advice finding things that need to be addressed before it goes to a client (if any).
More compliant advice tends to be harder for a client to understand. AI has started closing that gap allowing us to have fully compliant and understandable advice.
The goal isn't to work less. It's to become more capable. Here’s a quick suggestion that can help you start your AI journey. Spend a day writing down everything you do and ask yourself "Can AI do this for me"
Impact
The same philosophy that led me to ask people to use money well has led me to ask another question. How do we use AI well?
Because capability without purpose is just efficiency.
AI has a cost most of us never see. Global data centres burned through roughly 448 terawatt hours of electricity in 2025, with AI responsible for about a fifth of it. If data centres were a country, they'd be among the world's 5th or 6th largest electricity consumers.
We are the industry that tells people to use money well. We should be the industry that uses AI well too. That means offsetting the footprint of the tools we rely on, not just adopting them and looking away.
There are many options to offset your AI use. You could even ask AI to find one for you.
Looking ahead
This is a first draft of an idea, not a finished framework. Over the coming months I'll explore each part properly, share what's working, challenge my own thinking, and hopefully help other advisers navigate one of the biggest shifts our industry has seen.
New technology always outruns our wisdom about how to use it. The difference with AI is the head start: past technologies gave us generations to catch up. This one might only give us months.
The technology will keep getting better. The real question is whether our wisdom can keep up.
Don't learn AI. Use AI well.
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Ben Graham-Nellor is a financial adviser and founder of Smart Happy Money, based in Melbourne. He writes about building a more human, more inclusive financial advice industry.
