AI and Your Money: What It Can Do, What It Can’t, And Where It Could Get You Into Trouble
Have you started letting AI help you with your money? Maybe you’ve asked ChatGPT to build you a budget, or you’re using an app that automatically tracks your spending. Maybe you’ve gone further – asking a bot if your portfolio’s balanced, or which high-yield savings account is paying the most right now.
If so, you’re not alone. A new report from TD Bank found that 55% of people are now using AI to help manage their finances, up from just 10% a year ago – a massive shift in a very short time. But here’s the twist: most of us aren’t ready to hand AI the wheel entirely. Only 18% say they’d trust AI to make financial decisions entirely on its own. In other words, we want the insights, but ultimately, to be the ones making the final call.
So what does that look like? What can AI actually do for your money right now, and where do you still need a human in the room? We dug into it on a special episode of the HerMoney Podcast, sponsored by LIMRA, with Joanna Stern. She’s an Emmy-winning tech journalist, NBC News Chief Tech Analyst, and founder of New Things Media.
Stern is also the author of the new bestseller, I Am Not a Robot: My Year Using AI to Do Almost Everything, which recaps how she spent an entire year letting AI run her life – finances included – and lived to tell the tale.
“My job, as long as I can remember, has been to test new technology…so it was just really that on the extreme,” Stern says. “Usually I’m testing one or two products. With this, I was going all in, all year.”
HOW AI SAVED HER MONEY
While Stern let AI infiltrate every area of her life for 365 days (yes, even including an AI boyfriend and a robotic massage therapist), we wanted the details on how it helped with money – and specifically, whether it made it easier to save and make it.
Much like us, Stern believes time is money. That’s where she saw the most significant savings over the course of her experiment. The biggest payoff came while writing her book. “Some of the tasks that I had once hired a reporting assistant to do, I was then able to do using AI,” Stern says.
Stern estimates AI helped her write the book five to ten times faster, though it didn’t replace humans entirely. She still needed an illustrator, fact-checker and others to play a role. “All of these humans were really important to the book, but I believe that I handed over to many of them cleaner, better work because I used AI,” she says.
USING AI TO CUT CARE COSTS
Another one of Stern’s biggest wins started in the dentist chair. In her book, she investigates how some dentists are using AI to, in her words, “upsell the crap out of us.”
Case in point: Stern switched dentists and her new provider ran an AI tool that flagged cavities and areas needing a “deep clean.” The price tag? Over $1,000, with no guarantees insurance would cover it. Stern, who takes excellent care of her teeth, got a second opinion and ended up not needing the work done.
“My feeling was that what happened with this original dentist was that they were using AI to justify this higher-priced treatment,” she shares. “And as I’ve written the book, and now I’ve heard from a lot of others, people have said, I had the same experience.”
WHEN IT COMES TO SHRINKING YOUR BUDGET, YOU’RE STILL DOING THE WORK
Stern used AI-powered budgeting apps throughout her experiment. Useful, yes, but far from a magic bullet when it comes to saving money. As she explains, while AI is great at flagging where you may be overspending, it won’t take the necessary next steps for you to actually cut costs.
“Is it [AI] going to start to cancel those subscriptions? Is it going to go out and negotiate with the cable company? No, not yet,” says Stern. “That’s what’s coming. And I think that agentic use of having our AI and chatbots go out and save us money is absolutely a great potential of this technology.”
DID AI ACTUALLY MAKE HER MONEY?
While Stern says AI saved her money more than it helped her make, there was one area where she was able to cash in – a little bit. She put money into the investing platform Arta, where behind the scenes, AI was suggesting and improving her investment choices. “Maybe I made $500…really, I think it [the benefit of AI] comes in the savings right now.”
BEFORE YOU SHARE ANYTHING WITH BOTS, READ THIS
As technology continues to advance, and it shows up more and more in our daily lives, Stern says it’s important to be mindful of its limits. “We always have to remember AI is only as good as the data it has,” she stresses. “But we have now a more personalized way of getting to that data where we can give it our own problem and it helps us solve through it.”
Another thing to be aware of? Chatbot companies have privacy policies that can change overnight – and anything you feed them could surface somewhere you didn’t expect. Stern was careful about what she uploaded, and you should be too. “I really did stop myself,” she says. “I did not want to upload all my old tax documents to ChatGPT or Claude, because I would be stripping out so much personally identifiable information, which I suggest you do, especially if you’re doing it something related to healthcare or finance. Remove those Social Security numbers, remove the patient ID, remove all that information.”
RETIREMENT ADVICE? GET A HUMAN TO CHECK AI’S WORK
A Bloomberg piece recently tested AI on retirement planning and found that while it nailed the conventional wisdom much of the time, there were some dangerous blind spots. The worst offender? Telling a woman nearing retirement that “time is your protection from volatility” and stocks are reliable long-term. While that’s true in general, it’s not good advice for someone who doesn’t have decades to ride out a downturn.
Even Stern still leans on a human advisor for retirement. Hers recently handed her a form to fill out to help her prepare for that chapter of life. Her plan: let AI complete it (and double-check its work), see what her advisor says her strategy should be, and then compare it to what AI suggests.
“It’s a good experiment for me to try,” she shares. “My financial advisor isn’t gonna be happy, but let me see what happens. Let me fill that out using AI. Then let me ask AI what it thinks I should do. And then I’ll ask my financial advisor what he thinks I should do.”
THE BOTTOM LINE
AI can already help you in your day-to-day life, saving both money and time. What it can’t do, at least not yet, is replace your judgment on the big decisions: your investments, your retirement and your financial future. Use it to do the legwork, but keep yourself – or a trusted advisor – in charge of the final call. For more on how AI can (and can’t) help you with your money – especially when it comes to planning for retirement – check out this guide from LIMRA.