EXPOSED
The analytical core of this job — portfolio construction, rebalancing, Monte Carlo retirement projections, tax-loss harvesting, plan document production — is already commoditized by robo-advisors and planning software, and LLMs now draft the client-facing narrative around it. What survives is the part clients actually pay a fee for: talking a panicked retiree out of selling in a drawdown, mediating spousal disagreements about money, and owning a fiduciary recommendation with a name on it. Licensure (Series 65/66, CFP, state RIA registration) plus fiduciary liability keeps a human in the loop, but that shield is regulatory and thinner than a medical or CPA license.
Headcount grew steadily across the period.
Median pay $87,850 → $105,070 -4.3% in real terms
This line is counted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics — the one figure on this page that isn't a judgement of ours. Headcount moves on demand, offshoring, demographics and the business cycle, and automation is one term among several, often not the loudest.
So a falling line is not evidence that AI did it, and a rising one is not evidence that it won't. Both happen in this register: some occupations resist automation and shrink anyway, others are highly automatable and keep growing. The marked year is 2020.
BLS projection, 2024–2034
+9.6%
Percentage only. The projection counts a different population from the 266,800 above — it includes self-employed workers, which for this occupation is most of them, so the two headcounts are not comparable.
Growing, and only partly exposed
The BLS expects +9.6% more of these jobs by 2034, and at 52/100 the work is only partly exposed — some tasks are automatable, the core of the job is not. Nothing here is in tension.
Different clocks. The score is what current AI could do to this work today. The projection is how many of these jobs will exist in 2034. Everything between the two — how fast employers actually adopt, whether demand grows in the meantime — is why they can point opposite ways without either being wrong.
~24,100 openings a year on average, including replacing people who leave.
StrategistAsset AnalystAsset ManagerMoney ManagerClient AdvisorDebt CounselorEstate PlannerEstate TrusteeWealth AdvisorWealth ManagerAccount ManagerFinancial AgentPension AdvisorPersonal BankerBudget CounselorCredit CounselorFinancial AdvisorFinancial PlannerFiscal SpecialistInsurance AdvisorPortfolio ManagerFinance ConsultantInvestment AdvisorPension Consultant
Holding it up: trust premium . Weakest point: embodiment .
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier An 8 reflects that asset allocation, rebalancing triggers, Monte Carlo runs, RMD and Roth-conversion math, and the 60-page plan deliverable are all executed today by eMoney, MoneyGuidePro and Betterment's engine with no advisor keystrokes — what pulls it above the 0-6 band is the discovery meeting where a client's stated goals contradict their spending, and the annual review where the real work is behavioral, not computational.
Fully desk- and screen-based A 3 is right because everything happens on Zoom, in a conference room, or in Redtail — the only physical acts are handing over a signed ACAT form and driving to a client's kitchen table, neither of which requires a body that a courier or a screen share can't replace.
Licensed human required and personally liable An 11 sits at the bottom of the licensed band because Series 65/66 and state RIA registration are genuine legal barriers with individual Form ADV disclosure and personal FINRA/SEC exposure for unsuitable recommendations, but the license is a proctored exam and a filing rather than a residency, and an unlicensed AI can lawfully do all the analysis so long as a registered human signs the recommendation.
Exists to be accountable for ambiguous calls A 14 reflects fiduciary calls with no single right answer and irreversible consequences — whether to recommend a QLAC over a bond ladder, when a 72-year-old's cognitive decline requires contacting the trusted contact, how to allocate an inheritance between two adult children with different creditors — decisions where the advisor's documented reasoning is the only defense in an arbitration.
The verdict above describes this occupation as a whole. Almost nobody does the typical version of a job — tick what's actually in your week and see how your own mix sits.
Your task mix speaks to task resistance (8/20 here) — how much of the day's work current AI already does. That is the dimension the boxes above are about.
It cannot move the other three. Liability shield (11/20) is whether the law requires a licensed human to sign. Trust premium (16/20) is whether buyers specifically pay for a person. Judgment and accountability (14/20) is whether the role exists to own consequential calls. Those are facts about the occupation's standing, not about which tasks are in your week — a paralegal who does only trial exhibits still holds no licence. Together they are 41 of this occupation's 52 points (79%).
Embodiment (3/20) is also a property of the work rather than the worker, but we don't tag individual tasks as physical or not, so the picker can't tell you anything about it. That's a limit of this tool, not a claim.
Did we get the list right? Tell us what's missing — the tasks are written from the outside, and you're reading this from the inside.
No occupation passed every test: close enough to personal financial advisors on skills and subject matter, at least 10 points more resistant, no big jump in training, no new licence, no pay cut, and not shrinking on its own. That happens for 223 of the 654 occupations here that aren't SAFE, and it is worth stating plainly rather than leaving the section off.
The usual reason is that exposure travels with the skill profile. The jobs most similar to yours tend to be exposed for the same reasons yours is, so the near neighbours don't clear the gap — and the ones that do are a different kind of work, not a transfer of what you already know. Read that as a limit of this method, not a verdict that you're stuck: it only compares whole occupations, and it cannot see specialisation, industry, or anything you'd bring that isn't in a federal skill survey.
Here is that claim on your own job rather than in the abstract. These are the three occupations closest to this one by skill and subject matter — the places the work would most naturally transfer — with what the register scores them:
That is the whole problem in three lines. The nearest work is not meaningfully safer, so there is no move here that trades a similar skill set for a better verdict. This is not us running out of ideas — it is what the neighbourhood looks like.
The moves above are yours to make. This is the other half: what would have to change in the world for the occupation itself to score higher. None of it is in any one person's gift, but it is where the floor actually comes from. Scores here are not a one-way ratchet. Only two of the five dimensions — task resistance and embodiment — track what machines can do. The other three track law, what buyers will pay for, and who is answerable, and those move in both directions, often in response to the same pressure AI creates. If every lever below landed, this occupation would score around 68/100 — SAFE.
Genuine two-tier structure: if robo-platforms absorb allocation, rebalancing, tax-loss harvesting and plan-document production entirely, the residual day is behavioral coaching in drawdowns, spousal and intergenerational mediation, business-sale and equity-comp timing, and special-needs/divorce planning — work that resists automation. Watch for the shift showing up as fee models repricing from AUM basis points to retainer/flat planning fees.
SEC or state securities regulators adopting an explicit rule that AI-generated investment recommendations delivered to retail clients must be reviewed and attested by a named Series 65/66-registered person who retains fiduciary liability — the direction FINRA's 2024-25 AI guidance and the SEC's 'AI washing' enforcement (Delphia/Global Predictions, March 2024) already gesture at. A hard attestation requirement, not just supervisory policy, would move this several points.
A DOL fiduciary-style rule (or successor to the vacated 2024 Retirement Security Rule) that extends fiduciary status to rollover and annuity recommendations and specifies that an algorithm cannot be the fiduciary of record, forcing a licensed human signature on every rollover recommendation.
CFP Board enforcement precedent or arbitration awards holding the advisor personally accountable for failing to override a model output (e.g., unsuitable AI-driven allocation for a client with known liquidity needs), making the override decision itself the compensable duty.
Already near ceiling at 16; the marginal route is a visible retail-investor loss event traced to an unsupervised AI advice tool, of the kind that would generate FINRA arbitration claims and make 'human fiduciary' an advertised differentiator rather than a default.
The limit. Trust premium is already high and cannot carry much more; the realistic upside is concentrated in liability_shield, which remains regulatory rather than statutory-monopoly and can be thinned as easily as thickened — a robo-friendly SEC exemptive order moves it the other way. Embodiment has no route.
| New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ | 23,980 | $170,050 +62% |
| Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA | 13,980 | $124,490 +18% |
| Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach, FL | 8,390 | $125,670 +20% |
| Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN | 8,370 | $113,210 +8% |
| Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, PA-NJ-DE-MD | 7,390 | $116,560 +11% |
| San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA | 7,130 | $160,610 +53% |
| Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX | 6,230 | — |
| Phoenix-Mesa-Chandler, AZ | 5,000 | $103,680 -1% |
| New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ | 23,980 | $170,050 +62% |
| San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA | 7,130 | $160,610 +53% |
| Muskegon-Norton Shores, MI | 100 | $159,990 +52% |
We have no reported case of a named organisation automating this occupation. Not one deployment, not one announcement.
That is worth saying out loud next to a score of 52. The verdict above is about what the work exposes — what current AI could do to these tasks. It is not a claim that anyone has done it. For this occupation those two things have come apart completely: the capability argument is on this page, and the evidence column is empty.
Has AI actually changed your work? One tap, anonymous, and the running tally is public. Nothing else is asked of you.
Rather than check back: get the digest and we'll tell you what changed — or watch a single occupation from its own page.