AI and technology expected by growing number of younger trustees

Younger SMSF trustees are expecting their financial professionals to use the technology available to them, including traditional AI and the emerging agentic AI, a leading specialist said.

Dr Evan Morrison, HUB24’s head of innovation, said financial professionals are integrating AI and automation into their businesses to improve efficiency and enhance client outcomes, while ensuring innovation is adopted safely and strategically.

“AI can scale what’s already there,” Morrison said. “When paired with strong processes, quality data and human oversight, AI delivers its greatest productivity gains, lifting efficiency while keeping accountability with the practitioner.”

He said there are still many challenges ahead and although many older SMSF trustees still prefer a less technical approach, the rapidly growing younger cohort is now expecting their advisers, accountants and auditors to use technology in their practice.

Morrison said the digital literacy gap is growing and while under-30s are rapidly adopting AI the older professionals are more cautious.

He said the concept of “vibe programming” in which developers let AI write code, is “catching everyone by surprise”.

“The AI that we’ve been using is passive. It’s really good at a few things like summarisation, taking big content and making it small, translation and converting concepts between different language types, not just between languages, but different voices. And it’s been great at doing questions and answers and knowledge-base work,” Morrison told SMSF Adviser.

“Agentic AI is a tool that takes a set of beliefs, desires and intentions. So, for example, if I want to prepare my evaluation report or I want to prepare my tax return, my beliefs are the same as the world or my documents. I brought over my reports that I generated from my platform, and my intentions are the list of things I need to do to achieve my goal or to achieve my desires.

“The first thing you do is take generative AI and use the beliefs and the desires to produce a set of intentions or come up with a plan, then for every step of the plan, try and do the action.

“It can either be by calling an API (Application Programming Interface) or actually writing the code itself to perform the action. As long as it’s small and topic enough, what we’re finding is the agents are able to do it.”

Morrison said what this means is that agentic AI is now at the point where it can do quite complex tasks.

“I wouldn’t call this a safe way to work in the current environment, not only from the security point of view, but from a transparency point of view,” Morrison said.

“Though what it does is it changes the landscape. So, if you think about an adviser or an accountant using this sort of technology, what it does is it makes them a manager or a viewer.”

He continued that with this emerging technology, digital literacy is the biggest challenge facing the sector.

“Accounting and advising are still very much a human profession, in the sense you’re working with clients. For those advisers and accounts working with younger clientele there’s almost an expectation that they’re using AI. Young consumers expect augmentation,” he said.

“Older clientele, who are a little bit wiser and a little bit more understanding of what happens when you make mistakes, they’re the ones that are going to be far more insistent on making sure that a human is the one reviewing the work.”

He added that research has shown that the under-34-year-old cohort is adopting AI at a rapid pace and the older clients are less trustful of the technology.

“The thing is, it comes down to wisdom. You know that technology is not perfect, and we’ve all gone through this journey of there’s always a new technology that promises to change the world,” he said.

“We’ve all gone through this cycle before, and don’t get me wrong, there’s some really interesting things that AI can do, and it does add value in some areas, but there are still fundamental flaws in the architecture, and I don’t see us overcoming them in the short term.”

Keeli Cambourne

February 26 2026

smsfadviser.com