Claude, ChatGPT, and other AI chatbots are—for better or worse—becoming a more popular sounding board for people with questions.
Many of those questions are the same types of questions people have historically gone to Google for. “How did the Angels do today?” (They probably lost.) “Is Jackie Chan still alive?” (Yes, Bill, for the hundredth time, he is.) “How do you make a whiskey ginger twist?” (Have it listen to Chubby Checker.)
But people are also becoming more comfortable with making more specialized and consequential AI queries.
Questions about parenting, healthcare, even finances and investing—which Google previously would’ve answered by pointing people toward informational sources with varying amounts of expertise—are now being answered with … well, the aggregate of the wisdom of the masses AI has been trained on.
Good idea? Bad idea? Somewhere in between? That’s what we’ll be talking about today.
A Lot of People Already Ask Chat About Their Wallets
If you’re an adult who has used generative chat at any point, odds are that at some point, you’ve used it to ask for financial advice—and the odds are even greater that you were happy with the results.
Consider this late 2025 article from the New York Times:
“Two-thirds of adults who have used generative AI said they had used it for financial advice, and around 80 percent of those who acted on that advice said it had improved their financial situation, according to a recent survey of more than 1,000 people by Intuit Credit Karma. Younger generations are especially receptive: Around 82 percent of Generation Z and millennial AI users reported using it for financial guidance.”
What kinds of information were they seeking out? Well, here were the most common answers (respondents could select more than one):
- Basic personal finance concepts (35%)
- Financial goal setting and action plans (35%)
- Budgeting and expense management (34%)
- Optimizing savings (33%)
- Saving for retirement (31%)
- Investing in the stock market (32%)
In other words, people asked about most of the money essentials. That tracks. It’s what most of us with years of analyzing financial-topic search data would have expected.
Is there any question that the answers they received were helpful? After all, 80% of people said “it had improved their financial situation.”
Young and the Invested Tip: When does it make sense to seek out professional financial advice? Here are six situations we can think of.
We actually don’t doubt that AI would’ve been useful for some of those queries … but the answer to whether they were actually getting good advice is a lot more nuanced.
But simply put: AI is pretty useful in some categories, but not as useful—and even potentially harmful—in others.
The Pros and Cons of ‘Finance GPT’
To help readers better understand the capabilities and limitations of artificial intelligence as a financial how-to machine, we sat down for a conversation with Ben Rizzuto, CFP®, CRPS®, CPWA®, Wealth Strategist at Janus Henderson Investors. Rizzuto works with financial advisors and their high-net-worth clients to find solutions to retirement, wealth transfer, financial planning, and other issues.
What Can AI Do Right?
You don’t get an 80% satisfaction rating without doing something right. So we started by discussing some of the areas in which artificial intelligence really is equipped to give people accurate and useful answers.
“I think the basic financial concepts, the budgeting, the saving—those are areas where Gen AI can be helpful,” Rizzuto says. “When we think about just the general concepts, [AI] does a good job of explaining issues on whatever level one wants. You know: ‘Explain it to me like I’m a 5-year-old’ or ‘Explain it to me like I’m a golden retriever.’ I think that can be really helpful.”
Budgeting is another area AI is seemingly built for.
“I think it does a good job with large amounts of data,” he says. “It can really do a nice job putting in black-and-white terms. ‘This is your income. These are your expenses. These are some of the steps you should consider doing.’
“And I think that’s another reason why people feel better financially afterward is because it provides next steps, which, all of us are trying to figure out what to do next. I believe that wholeheartedly. And AI does a good job of providing those things.”
And ironically enough, you could actually make a lot of headway by asking AI chat how to talk to financial advisors.
“I think AI is good at providing us with questions to consider [when talking to a financial advisor],” Rizzuto says. “People are nervous about interviewing advisors, so you could ask AI, ‘What are the top questions I should ask an advisor to help figure out if there’s a fit?’ I think that is a good usage of AI. It does a good job of providing ideas that I haven’t thought about.”
Young and the Invested Tip: How do you know a financial advisor is right for you? Here are a few things to look out for.
Where Might AI Struggle?
As many people might guess, the “squishier” the subject matter, the more potential holes there are in AI’s ability to deliver a good solution.
Take goal-setting, for instance.
“I could ask you, ‘Kyle, what are your financial goals?” and you could list off a number of things,” Rizzuto says. “But where some sort of human interaction comes into play and becomes important—where a financial advisor might be helpful—is really understanding why. Why are those goals important to you? Having that conversation is important because it helps us, as investors, solidify our goals and why we want to achieve them.
“It helps that financial advisors (if we’re working with one) can create a plan for us that can help us get to those goals. Again, I think that’s where human conversation can be helpful—to help us really figure out the cost and benefit of tradeoffs in our specific situation.”
Where Could AI Be Downright Harmful?
Before our interview, Rizzuto pointed us toward a 2025 paper, “Financial advice behavior: humans versus AI,” in which Ylva Baeckström and Roman Matkovskyy discussed the findings from their study of advice given by AI tools like ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, as well as human advisors.
The study found that AI advisors were consistently more conservative than human advisors. “Notably, the AI advisors systematically under‑risked clients, leading to lower long‑term returns,” Rizzuto said.
A good analogy, he said, was to think about AI advice as a car with a built-in speed limiter: “It feels steady and safe, but never goes as fast as it reasonably could, even on a clear highway.” Baeckström and Matkovskyy found that under-risking could cost roughly a percentage point of return annually and “those lower returns were not meaningfully offset by lower long-run volatility.”
What about a worse-case scenario of really conservative advice?
“I was just in Phoenix. Waymo has a big presence there. And I was talking to a couple people who said they don’t put Waymo on the highways because if it doesn’t know what to do, it just stops,” he says. “So it might feel safe, but it’s going to have a bad ending.”
What does “just stopping” on the highway look like? Think about the numerous investors who, in the face of a rapidly declining market, pulled out most if not all of their funds from the market—then either rejoined the market long after the recovery or stayed away from the market from that point forward. (In other words: What you absolutely should not do in a bear market.)
Human advisors weren’t without fault, by the way. They “systematically project their own risk preferences onto clients,” Rizzuto says. But their bias tended to decline with age, and overall, they were “far more context-responsive and growth-oriented compared to AI advisors.”
He finished off the car analogy by comparing human advisors to experienced drivers. “They might occasionally drive a little too fast or a little too slow, but they’re capable of constantly adjusting based on road conditions, destination, and time horizon.”
Young and the Invested Tip: Yes, it’s possible to screw up when choosing a financial advisor. These are some of the most common mistakes people make.
AI Tells You What You Want to Hear
Among AI chatbots’ many characteristics is a seeming willingness to please. They’re pliant, they’re agreeable, and they’re sometimes programmed specifically to keep you engaged.
None of that is inherently bad, but it certainly can have a wide range of consequences.
Our discussion briefly digressed to recent headlines about kids who talked about their emotional distress to chatbots, which in turn not only provided insufficient help, but in some cases even encouraged their suicides.
“What’s happening [in finance] isn’t as important nor as tragic as that,” Rizzuto says. “But depending on the way we are talking with AI, it might lead us down a specific path based on what it feels we might want to hear.”
“Let’s say we’re including prompts that talk about wanting aggressive returns, high returns. Or that we want to buy a house in a short period of time. It’s going to take us down that route,” he says. “But that’s only one piece of the overall puzzle.”
Among the smartest things you can do if you are prompting AI for financial information? Be precise. And ask it to play devil’s advocate. “What are the positives of this financial decision … and what are some possible negatives, too?”
AI: Good Generally, Flawed Specifically
One of the easiest ways to understand the risk of getting less-than-ideal advice from chatbots is understanding how ChatGPT and other tools are designed.
“What does GPT stand for?” Rizzuto asks. “It’s ‘generative, pre-trained transformers.’ They’ve been trained on all of human history. It’s a vast average of everything. And I always say that averages are helpful, but we do not live our personal lives on the average.
Young and the Invested Tip: People commonly think that financial advisors are only for inexperienced investors. Not so!
“AI can help us head in a direction, but it’s not going to be as specific a direction or as specific an answer as it could be for one’s specific situation.”
AI does a good job of answering a question like “What does this mean?” But it doesn’t necessarily do a good job of answering a question like “What does this mean for me personally?”
“That’s an important distinction,” Rizzuto says. “Those are two very different questions with two possibly very different answers.”
He acknowledged that one of the biggest considerations is cost—that many people might settle for AI help because they don’t believe they have enough money for a financial advisor. But human help is out there, even for those who think they can’t access it.
“I always tell people, ‘There is an advisor out there for everyone,'” he says. “Finding that person might take some time, but it’s an important process that needs to be done. Whether it’s through individual advisors, through your 401(k) plan … there’s all sorts of advice that’s available via good, old-fashioned humans.”
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Thank you once again for reading, and we hope you enjoy the long weekend. Also, a reminder: The markets are closed Monday in observance of Memorial Day.
Riley & Kyle
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