25/08/2026
Ask seven AI tools the same financial planning question and you get seven different answers.
That's what researchers found when they tested ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, DeepSeek, Gemini, Meta AI and Perplexity on three ordinary questions.
1) How much to hold in emergency savings
2) What to draw down in retirement
3) How to split a portfolio
The answers varied enormously depending on which tool was asked.
They ran the same prompts again, changing only the race and gender of the person described. Some tools gave the same answer every time. Others didn't.
One put a household into a far more cautious portfolio than an otherwise identical one, purely on the basis of the demographic detail. Bias, the researchers said, rather than any financial reason.
Every tool sounded equally certain throughout.
Nothing in how the advice was delivered gave any clue it might be wrong.
None of this makes the technology a bad thing. These tools are remarkable, and they are excellent for understanding a concept or drafting something. But an AI model works with what it is given, and the expensive gaps in a financial life sit in the questions nobody thought to ask. The concern is the weight placed on answers drawn from an incomplete picture.
An AI owes you no fiduciary duty. Nothing obliges it to act in your interests. There's no file, no reasoning on record, and nobody to go back to.
A fiduciary has to put your interests ahead of their own, and can be held to it. The advice is documented. The conflicts are disclosed. The reasoning is written down, so it can be questioned, defended, and revisited when your circumstances change.
That's the difference between getting an answer based on a prompt, and being guided by a fiduciary financial life manager. Any LLM can give you the first. Guidance is a different thing entirely.
An answer also ends when the chat window closes. Financial success is determined less by what you know than by what you do, and keep doing. The real value of a fiduciary financial life manager sits there: raising your awareness of what the money is for, then helping you act on it, with someone answerable for the outcome.