The fear is understandable. AI processes data faster than any human. It generates client-ready reports in seconds. It analyzes patterns with a precision that took analysts careers to develop. And it is only getting started. For financial advisors watching this unfold, the question pressing hardest is not whether AI will change the profession, because it already has. The question is where, exactly, a human advisor still wins.
Edmund Chien has a clear answer. Chien is a public speaker and coach for financial professionals who spent over 25 years in the industry building a $70 million book of business comprised of multimillionaire households, with a focus on multigenerational family portfolios. His framework, grounded in behavioral finance, is built on a simple but consequential premise: AI is losing in the 93% of communication that is not words.
The Intersection That Matters
Chien opens with a definition. "Behavioral finance," he says, "is the intersection between psychology and finance. And really helping people to influence good decisions and helping them come to the right decisions by understanding the psychological component of things."
That intersection is exactly where AI struggles most. Confirmation bias, negativity bias, the psychological blind spots that drive poor financial decisions, require a human to identify them in real time, in a room, reading a person. When clients submit prompts to an AI system shaped by those same biases, the system tends to validate rather than challenge. The blind spot stays hidden. The advisor who can see it has an irreplaceable edge.
The 7-38-55 Rule and Why It Decides Everything
The framework Chien returns to repeatedly is the 7-38-55 rule from communication research: 7% of communication is the words spoken, 38% is tone, and 55% is body language. "It's that 38 and 55 that AI is currently struggling with," he observes. AI has no body. It cannot read a shoulder that tightens or arms that cross. It cannot modulate its tone in response to a flicker of doubt in someone's eyes.
Chien illustrates this with a story from early in his career. A high-net-worth client, after nearly three meetings, suddenly introduced his wife, who walked in with arms crossed, shoulders hunched, legs crossed, and a visible scowl. The client asked Chien to start the sales process from the beginning. Chien stopped. He read her body language back to her instead: "Let me guess, is that your husband has gone from one advisor to another and he keeps losing, and those advisors keep swindling you and losing money for you."
The effect was immediate. "It was like, man, she just started to melt." He closed the account in that session, after three meetings had not gotten the husband there. "If you take a look at AI," Chien notes, "AI will do what you ask it to. So if that husband asked an AI version of myself, can you start the sales process from the beginning? AI has to respond to that. AI is not going to say like, oh, hang on a sec. Before we go too far, I think we should address your wife's body language first."
Blue Ocean, Not Red
For advisors who have built their identity around technical expertise and designations, Chien's argument requires a pivot. He draws on the framework of Blue Ocean Strategy, the idea that competing in a crowded, contested space produces diminishing returns, while rendering competition irrelevant through differentiation is where real advantage lives. "If we're talking about going up against AI and being more analytical and technically correct, then there's no way that we can beat AI. AI is going to beat us hands down, and it's only getting started."
The move, then, is directional. "If you want to compete with AI, don't try to do a red ocean where trying to compete at being a better analyst. Instead, try to compete on being a better friend to people because that's where AI doesn't have as much power."
10,000 Hours of the Right Thing
Soft skills are not a weekend course. Chien is direct about the investment required: the four stages of learning, from unconscious incompetence to unconscious competence, demand something closer to Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000-hour threshold than a certification exam. Reading microexpressions, modulating tone, deploying wit at precisely the right moment, these are not downloaded. They are practiced until they become instinct.
Chien draws on six years of improv theater training as the foundation of his own fluency. Improv, he explains, isolates and develops exactly the skills the 38-55 domain requires: reading a room, responding without a script, using humor to lower defenses and build trust at speed. "When you get somebody that is a stranger, we're always scanning for danger. And if you can get a stranger to chuckle and laugh... it takes people's defenses down and subconsciously it registers, if I'm laughing, then I must like this person."
An Industry-Wide Obligation
Chien closes with a call that goes beyond individual practice development. The shift toward robo-advisors and AI-driven financial services is not inevitable, but countering it requires a collective argument. "I think it's upon all of us as an industry to convince the general population and society that you want somebody with some wit, some emotional intelligence that understands who you are."
The advisor who masters oxytocin, human connection, genuine care, the felt experience of being seen and heard, is not competing with AI. They are operating in a category AI cannot yet enter. "Become a super specialist at prospects and your clients," Chien says. That is the blue ocean. And it is wide open.
5 Key Takeaways
- AI amplifies bias rather than correcting it. Confirmation bias and negativity bias live in the client's blind spot. When AI responds to prompts shaped by those biases, it validates rather than challenges them. The advisor who can identify and name those biases in real time holds a structural advantage no algorithm currently replicates.
- 93% of client communication is nonverbal. The 7-38-55 rule, 7% words, 38% tone, 55% body language, defines the terrain where human advisors outperform AI most decisively. AI cannot read a room. Advisors who train themselves to do so are building a durable competitive moat.
- Technical expertise alone is a shrinking asset. Designations and analytical depth remain important, but AI is building a better technical field faster than any individual can match. Doubling down on hard skills as a primary differentiator is the red ocean. The blue ocean is behavioral and relational fluency.
- Soft skills require practice, not just knowledge. Moving from conscious competence to unconscious competence in interpersonal skills demands repetition at scale, closer to 10,000 hours than a reading list. Improv, active listening training, and real client interaction are the curriculum. There is no shortcut.
- Advisors have a collective obligation to make the case for human advice. AI-driven financial services will expand. Whether human advisors retain their place in clients' lives depends in part on how well the profession communicates the value of emotional intelligence, genuine care, and the experience of being truly understood. That argument belongs to the whole industry, not just the individual practice.
Footnote:
1 Chien, Edmund, and Geoff Evans. "Flourishing in the Age of AI." AdvisorTalk, PPI, 28 Oct. 2025, www.advisortalk.ca/2025/10/28/flourishing-in-the-age-of-ai/.
