Investors who already pay for financial advice are the most likely to take a chatbot’s word on money matters without checking it, according to a new consumer study from AI advice app Evergreen.ai, putting fresh pressure on advisors to ask clients what they have been reading.
Among respondents who work with a financial advisor, 63.8% said they had asked an AI tool a question about their money in the past 12 months, compared with 38.5% of those without one. Of the advised AI users, 41.9% said they acted on an answer without checking it against another source or a professional – nearly triple the 14.4% rate among unadvised users.
Across the full sample, 48.4% had asked a chatbot about their finances. Of AI users who answered the follow-up question, 77.8% acted on what they were told, and 28.7% did so without verifying it.
The Evergreen.ai Financial Decisions Study analyzed 1,981 responses from U.S. adults aged 25 to 75 who make or share their household’s financial decisions.
Evergreen.ai is a service of Evergreen Wealth Advisors, a Miami-based registered investment adviser that was launched by PayPal and Intuit cofounder Bill Harris in September last year.
While they didn't offer up a possible cause, the report's authors suggest that people used to seeking professional guidance may treat a chatbot as one more adviser in the room. They also caution that the data shows an association, not proof that advice drives the behavior.
AI users as a group were less likely to report making a major decision without knowing its tax impact: 15.4% versus 41.6% of nonusers. The report notes that AI users skew wealthier and are more likely to have an advisor, so that gap reflects who they are more than what the technology did for them.
“The financial advice gap in this country is real, and Americans are desperately seeking financial guidance,” said Bill Harris, founder and CEO of Evergreen.ai. “They are looking for answers wherever they can find them, and nearly half of those we surveyed have already turned to AI. The question is whether the tools they are using were built to deserve their trust.”
Harris isn't the only one pitching a product to fill that gap. Just last week, M1 launched its own AI advisor aimed at households who are turned away by wealth managers.
Benchmarking by advisor fintech Saturn showed that popular AI chatbots give wrong financial answers more often than right. with the best-performing free model still returning incorrect or incomplete responses 56% of the time.
A separate quarterly survey from Topeka, Kansas-based annuity provider Security Benefit suggests advisors are already seeing this in meetings. Conducted with Greenwald Research among 200 U.S. financial professionals, it found that 45% say clients often or sometimes bring AI-sourced information into discussions. Nearly nine in 10, or 89%, expect those inquiries to increase over the next year.
Advisors are heavy users themselves. Some 85% use AI in their practices, most often for notetaking or meeting transcription (49%), summarizing market or investment research (47%) and drafting client communications (43%). About 12% use it to help build client portfolios. Eight in 10 plan to increase their use, and none expect to cut back.
“What stands out is that AI has become part of the conversation on both sides of the advisor-client relationship,” said Justin Jacquinot, senior vice president and head of IMO and RIA channels at Security Benefit.
“As more clients turn to AI for financial information, advisors have an important role to play in providing context, helping clients evaluate what they are seeing and translating information into decisions that support long-term financial goals,” Jaquinot said.
The Evergreen.ai data points to planning gaps that advisors can close.
Among respondents who made a major financial decision where taxes were relevant, 26.6% did not calculate the tax impact or were unsure of it. Only 33.1% worked it out in detail, and the largest group, 40.3%, relied on a rough estimate of their own.
Respondents ranked tax planning as their most urgent year-end decision. Even so, just 26.2% planned to make tax moves before the year closes.
Retirement shows a similar pattern. Some 42.4% of respondents have never tried to calculate how much they will need to retire. That includes 32.9% of those who expect to retire within 15 years. The share without an estimate reaches 56.8% among people with no advisor, compared with 19.9% among those who have one.
There is a charitable-giving opening as well. Some 47.6% of respondents had never heard of donor-advised funds, the giving accounts that let donors take a tax deduction now and recommend grants later. Among people who donated in the past year, the figure was 41.9%.
“People are making decisions about taxes, retirement and their financial futures without always having the answers they need,” Harris said.
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