Advised investors ask AI more and verify less, Evergreen.ai study finds

Investors who already pay for financial advice are more likely than those who don't to ask an AI tool about their money, according to an Evergreen.ai study reported by InvestmentNews on October 16. They were also nearly three times as likely to act on the answer without checking it.

Among advised respondents, 63.8% said they had asked an AI tool about their money in the past 12 months, compared with 38.5% of those without an advisor.

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.

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. Across the full sample, 48.4% had asked a chatbot about their finances, and among AI users who answered a follow-up question, 77.8% acted on what they were told while 28.7% did so without verifying it.

The report's authors suggest that people used to seeking professional guidance may treat a chatbot as one more adviser in the room, but they caution that the data shows an association, not proof that advice drives the behavior. AI users were less likely to report making a major decision without knowing its tax impact, 15.4% versus 41.6% of nonusers, a gap the report attributes to AI users skewing wealthier and being more likely to have an advisor.

Combining the study's two advised-respondent figures, about 27% of advised respondents asked an AI tool a money question in the past 12 months and then acted without verifying the answer.

Separate benchmarking by advisor fintech Saturn, cited by InvestmentNews, found popular AI chatbots give wrong financial answers more often than right. The best-performing free model still returned incorrect or incomplete responses 56% of the time.

A quarterly survey from Topeka, Kansas-based Security Benefit, run with Greenwald Research among 200 U.S. financial professionals, found that 45% say clients often or sometimes bring AI-sourced information.

The study's sponsor sells a product in this category. Evergreen.ai is a service of Evergreen Wealth Advisors, a Miami-based registered investment adviser that PayPal and Intuit cofounder Bill Harris launched in September of last year. M1 launched its own AI advisor aimed at households turned away by wealth managers the week before the InvestmentNews report.

"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."