AI Can Talk About Your Money. But Can It Advise on It?

I use AI tools regularly, for research, for drafting, for thinking through problems from a different angle. So I want to be honest here rather than defensive: tools like ChatGPT are genuinely impressive, and if you use one to ask “what is the difference between a mortgage offset account and a revolving credit facility” or “how does compounding work,” you will very likely get a clear, competent, well-explained answer. That is not nothing. Financial literacy has historically been a real barrier for a lot of people, and having a patient, always-available explainer is a genuine improvement on where things used to be.

So this is not a piece about why AI is bad at money. It is a piece about the specific, important gap between explaining money and advising on yours.

What AI is genuinely good at

Give credit where it’s due. General purpose AI tools are strong at:

• Explaining concepts clearly, what compound interest is, how KiwiSaver generally works, the difference between growth and income investments, in plain language, at whatever level of detail you ask for.
• Summarising and organising information you already have, helping you understand a document, compare general options, or structure your thinking before a conversation with an adviser.
• Being available at 11pm on a Tuesday when a question is nagging at you and there is no one else to ask right then.

If your goal is general financial education, these tools are a legitimately useful resource, and I would encourage people to use them for exactly that.

Where the gap actually is

The gap is not that AI gives “wrong” information, most of the time it doesn’t. The gap is structural, in what these tools are and are not able to do.

It doesn’t know your full picture, and often can’t verify what you tell it. A real financial plan depends on details that are easy to get wrong or leave out when you are typing into a chat box, your actual debt structure, how your income really moves through the year, what your risk tolerance genuinely is once markets get uncomfortable rather than how it feels in the abstract, what your partner’s situation looks like, what you are not saying because you haven’t thought to mention it. A generic answer to a generic question about “your” situation is still generic.

It cannot give you regulated, personalised financial advice, and a responsible tool will generally tell you so. There is a meaningful difference between explaining how something works in general and recommending what you specifically should do, given your specific circumstances, obligations and goals. That distinction exists for a good reason: personalised advice carries real consequences if it’s wrong, and it needs to be built on a genuine understanding of your situation, not a single conversation’s worth of context.

It has no accountability for the outcome. This is the part that gets overlooked. When I put together a plan with a client, I am on the hook for that advice. If circumstances change, we revisit it together. If something in the plan isn’t working, that is a conversation we have, and I carry professional responsibility for the advice given. An AI tool has no ongoing relationship with your life, no obligation to check in when your situation changes, and no accountability if a generic answer gets applied to a situation it was never built to handle.

It doesn’t push back or ask the uncomfortable follow-up. A good adviser doesn’t just answer the question you asked, they ask what you actually meant, and sometimes challenge the assumption behind the question in the first place. “Should I pay off my mortgage or invest” is a common question, and the genuinely useful answer often starts with a different question about your goals, your debt aversion, your timeline, and your whole financial picture, not a general rule pulled from average scenarios.

Two different jobs

I think the clearest way to put it is this: AI is excellent at giving you information. A fiduciary adviser’s job is to take responsibility for a plan built around your actual life, then stay accountable for it as that life changes. Those are related jobs, but they are not the same job, and treating a chat tool as a substitute for the second one is where people can get into trouble, not because the AI lied to them, but because generic guidance applied to a specific life is a different thing from advice.

Use AI to get informed. Use an adviser to get a plan you can actually rely on, and someone who owns the outcome with you. If you have been piecing together general information and want to turn it into an actual plan built around your circumstances, that is exactly what a free discovery session is for.