Don’t rely on AI for personal finance advice, study finds
Don’t rely on AI for personal finance advice, study finds
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/07/ai-personal-finance-advice.html
Publish Date: 2026-07-07 12:21:00
Source Domain: www.cnbc.com
Alexsl | Istock Unreleased | Getty Images
When it comes to personal finance, artificial intelligence gives advice that can be inaccurate or demographically biased, and can range widely depending on the particular program that consumers use, according to a new academic research study.
The research — which studied seven “widely available” generative AI platforms — found “significant variation” in how GenAI answered prompts about emergency savings, asset allocation and withdrawals from a retirement portfolio.
Researchers examined free-access versions of ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, DeepSeek, Gemini, Meta AI and Perplexity.
“GenAI-driven responses may sound confident but can still be incomplete, misleading, or incorrect,” according to the paper, published last month in the Journal of Financial Planning and authored by finance professors at the University of Georgia and University of Rome Tor Vergata in Italy.
Its “suboptimal” or biased outputs raise questions “about the consistency and fairness of GenAI-driven recommendations,” according to authors Swarn Chatterjee, Brenda Cude and Gianni Nicolini.
The findings come as a large share of Americans are turning to AI to help manage their money.
Two out of three Americans — 66% — who have used GenAI said they’ve leveraged it for financial advice, according to an Intuit Credit Karma survey published in September. The share is higher for Gen Z and millennials, at 82% for each cohort.
Experts said that AI is generally good at providing high-level overviews of financial topics: For example, why it’s important to diversify investments, or why exchange-traded funds may be better than mutual funds in some cases but not others.
However, it has limitations that mean users shouldn’t trust its output blindly, they said.
For one, the programs can also provide wrong answers due to so-called “hallucination” of the algorithm, experts said.
“One of the things about LLMs that I find particularly concerning is that no matter what you ask…
