Brian Portnoy, founder and CEO of Shaping Wealth, emphasizes the importance of emotions in investing and advises advisors to develop their human capabilities in the face of AI.
Brian Portnoy , founder and CEO of Shaping Wealth , speaks at Globe Advisor's Wealth Leadership Forum 2026 on Monday. Photo by Jenna Muirhead. Advisors are often taught to be rational and to take the emotion out of investing.
Brian Portnoy, founder and chief executive officer of wealth-tech platform Shaping Wealth, believes that’s impossible.
“There’s no such thing as taking the emotions out of anything. It’s just here, just like oxygen or gravity,” Mr. Portnoy said on Monday in a keynote address to Globe Advisor’s Wealth Leadership Forum 2026 in Toronto.
“Emotion precedes cognition,” he added. “Think about how much of the wealth management industry actually believes that. I would say close to zero. ” Taking feelings seriously, however, is about to become much more important with the advent of artificial intelligence.
Mr. Portnoy says advisors have dual roles: mechanics and guides. The mechanic provides the technical expertise in investments, estate planning, insurance and other areas that form the “critical, non-negotiable elements” of financial advice. The guide is the “human being helping other humans navigate uncertainty, complexity and change. ” The skills required for each role are quite different and the demand for them is shifting because AI is commoditizing the mechanic’s expertise.
As the time required for portfolio rebalancing or tax strategy is drastically reduced, advisors need to develop and scale their distinctly human capabilities to become better guides, he said. The good news is empathy can be learned – and AI may actually help. As the technology is embedded into daily workflows and software, it can measure – based on transcripts, recordings and other data – how advisors perform in specific soft skills.
“We can now see in a very granular sense, are you good at active listening? Are you good at empathetic responses? Are you good at inspiring confidence in your client? ” Mr. Portnoy said.
As more and more clients come to advisors with financial plans and investment strategies from OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude, the advisors who can listen, tell stories, build trust, process emotions and help clients navigate change, he said, are the ones who will manage to hold onto those clients and win new ones. Are you reading us on the web or did someone forward the e-mail version to you?
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