One of the popular topics of conversation at investment advisor conferences, such as this week’s annual conference in Las Vegas hosted by the Investment Management Consultants Association, centers on robo-advisors: those automated, online investment platforms that have seemingly taken the investment world by storm.

Some, if not many, advisors are worried that robos potentially could eat their lunch. But should they fear for their careers? While the robos—such as well-known players Wealthfront and Betterment—are disruptors regarding portfolio construction, humans still have enough advantages to keep them in the game, and their imminent demise has been greatly exaggerated.

But that doesn’t mean financial advisors should ignore the robos and the value proposition they offer.

This much we know: Robo-advisors have done a good job in constructing diversified, low-cost portfolios based on risk profiles supplied by investors. These portfolios generally consist of exchange-traded funds, and they’ve been popular with young people new to investing. In addition, they have disrupted the financial advisory pricing model to some extent.

But most robo programs have launched during the current bull market that kicked into high gear starting in March 2009, and one of the big unknowns is whether robo-advisor tools will be able to protect investors from themselves when stocks eventually go south. In other words, will investors panic and bail on the market at the wrong time, thus shooting their assets in the foot?

“What will be interesting to see is when those first-time investors, we’ll call them the millennials who are just getting into investing and this is their preferred way and they like technology solutions, what’s going to happen when the market turns over and perhaps goes into a bear market,” said Scott Welch, founder of Unconstrained Thought, a macroeconomic and wealth management consultancy, who spoke on a robo-focused panel session at the IMCA conference.

“That’s why I’m not up here telling you you’re all out of jobs. It [robo solutions] will replace part of what you do and part of how you define your value proposition, but when markets go up or down and there is planning requirements and intergenerational stuff, those are human skills and I think that’s how it’s going to play out.”

Welch and other panelists stressed that robo-advisors aren’t going away and that automated solutions will only become more sophisticated, so financial advisors will need to clearly define their value proposition to clients.

Judson Bergman, chairman and CEO at Envestnet, a provider of wealth management services to investment advisors, said it’s important to look at where the human financial advisor adds value, otherwise known as advisor alpha.

He cited an Envestnet study that found financial planning, including tax and estate planning, could add as much as 2,000 basis points over the life of a relationship. He added that other facets of a financial planner’s arsenal, such as systematic rebalancing, could also add alpha.

“The area where it’s harder to create alpha is in asset-class selection and portfolio construction,” Bergman said, adding that portfolio construction is where robo-advisors excel. “The biggest gaps [between what human and robo-advisors provide] are in the areas of financial planning and tax and estate planning.”

Bergman noted that Envestnet research shows 72 percent of affluent and high-net-worth millennials said they want a human advisor in the mix, but they want them in a very specific way.

Bergman pointed to his personal situation to illustrate how human advisors and robo platforms can co-exist. “I subscribe to TurboTax, but I also have a CPA, and I have no intention of not having a CPA,” he said.

One oft-discussed belief is that millennial investors will likely migrate away from robo programs and flock to human advisors as they acquire more assets and their financial situations become more complex.

“That’s probably true, at least in our professional lifespan,” Welch said. “But I think the question assumes ‘if/or,’ but it’s not—it’s ‘and.’ As they [millennial investors] evolve in terms of means and affluence, you [financial advisors] will have evolved as well and this [automated investing services] will be part of your offering.

“This isn’t a competitive threat if you don’t want it to be,” Welch continued, adding that an advisor who spends gobs of time finding the next great small-cap value manager will have a hard time growing his or her business. Automated portfolio-construction tools, he posited, can help advisors become more time- and cost-efficient while helping them focus more on value-added services that separate them from robo-type services.

The session's panelists hammered home the point that advisors can’t stick their head in the sand regarding the potential impact of ever-changing technology on their practices.

“How can anybody in this room not think that technology won’t disrupt their practice?” he asked. “It will disrupt your business and change the way you do business.”

Steve Lockshin, founder of Convergent Wealth Advisors, asked attendees how many of them had a digital robo-advisor account. A tiny portion raised their hands.

“That’s crazy . . . that’s probably about 4 percent of you,” Lockshin said. “Every one of you should have an account at two or three of the firms such as SigFig or Personal Capital, which cost nothing. You should try them so you know what your consumers are looking at because one day they’re going to come to you and say, ‘Why aren’t you offering this?’ And you’re not going to know how to answer that question because you won’t know what ‘this’ is.”

“Integrating first means trying and understanding what’s there, and then comes adopting,” he added.