The New Counsel: Human Judgment in an AI Age

More clients are arriving better informed. The producer's role is rising toward judgment.

Samuel Koh · 3 October 2026

Have you had the same hum at the back of your mind, wondering if AI will eventually replace the producer? It may sound like;

"I feel it in the quiet moments after a client asks a question that I once could answer alone. A hum of wonder, not panic. If a tool can explain the product, summarise the data, and walk through the options, what is my part now?"

I don’t see that question as a weakness. It is a sign of attention, and it deserves a clear answer. Not many are bracing for this shift, and we can get ready for it.

The client is arriving differently

Over the past few years, I’ve watched clients evolve. Not dramatically. Not all at once. But more of the clients I meet now have done the research. They have compared the options on their phone in the car on the way to the meeting. They have asked the chatbot what the difference is between the two plans I am about to present. They arrive with a floor of knowledge that, a decade ago, producers used to build for them from scratch.

This is not a universal story. Not every client is doing this. But the direction is clear, and the more informed they become, the more discerning they are likely to be. They want more than an explanation. They want someone who can tell them what matters.

Information can be shared; judgment cannot be outsourced by the producer.

Nicholas Christakis says it well in The Isolation of Social Media (Harvard Medicine Magazine, Spring 2022): “A very deep and fundamental principle of human social networks is that they magnify whatever they are seeded with.” For clients who are already researching, that principle means the information around them is amplified. What that magnifies is not the data. It is the question underneath: so what does this mean for me?

What is actually rising

The expectation is beyond the need for the producer to know more. The expectation is that the producer will judge better. That they will know what is relevant and what is noise. That they will sit with the uncertainty rather than paper over it. That they will say, "Here is what I would do, and here is why, and here is what I would watch for."

That is a different skill set than the one we were trained on. It is also, I would argue, a harder one. You cannot download judgment. You have to earn it, in the room, with the person, over time.

The new counsel

I have been in this industry since 1993. I built my first tools for advisers in 1995, and by 2015 I had founded a platform to bring those tools together. I have watched the producer's role change more than once in that span.

When a routine task becomes easy for clients to do themselves, the part of the job that felt most threatened often turns out to be the part that mattered least. Take family travel insurance. A client can buy that on their own now. So the producer moved upstream, advising on the things that mattered more to the client, and stayed relevant.

I think this shift will follow a similar pattern. The parts of the role that look most replaceable are the ones already being replaced: the explaining, the summarising, the walking through of options. That is not the threat; it is the old floor being removed. The part that looks most fragile, the judgment and the willingness to stand behind a recommendation, is about to become the whole job.

When AI raises the floor of knowledge, human judgment becomes the whole building.

I am not saying every client will long for a human voice just because the information is available to them. I do not think that is proven. Here is what I do think. When the information is everywhere, many clients want someone who can stand behind it, put it in plain language, and say “I would do it this way, and I will be here when the outcome comes.” That is more than a product, and more than a relationship. A tool cannot copy it, because it takes a name, a face, and a willingness to be accountable.

An invitation

I am not writing this as a warning. I am writing it as a colleague who has been in the room long enough to see the shape of what is coming, and who thinks we get to decide what it looks like.

The client out there is not waiting for us to evolve. They change as the marketplace changes, as the world shifts. The question is not whether the new counsel will exist. It is whether we will be the ones who define it.

I would rather we do.