21% of people use AI for financial advice

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The Hard Shoulder, with Ciara Kelly and Shane Colman.

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Now, the Department of Finance's 2026 Consumer Sentiment Banking Survey has highlighted the growing use of artificial intelligence in financial services. The survey found that 21%, so that's one in five respondents, had used AI to obtain information or advice about financial products and services. And joining us now to discuss this phenomenon is Robert Whelan, Managing Director of Rockwell Financial Services, and Ciara O'Brien, Business and Tech Journalist with The Irish Times. Ciara, I might come to you first of all, whereabouts are people getting, I suppose, their AI financial advice? Is it largely things like ChatGPT and Claude and GROK and those sorts of platforms?

Ciara O'Brien (1:23)

Well, they didn't specify exactly in that study where people were getting them from, they did say that they'd used AI to obtain information or advice about these products and services. And the natural kind of home for that would be the more readily available tools. So it would be the likes of ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude. And you're going to get various different results from that.

If you ask Gemini what you should invest your money in, the first thing you're going to get back is, I'm not a financial advisor. And that's actually the strategy it should be taking, because at the end of the day, and I'm sure any financial advisor will tell you this, but when you are giving out financial advice on what you should invest your money in, there's a lot of things that they have to take into account, and there's accountability there. So if I go to a financial advisor and they advise me wrongly, I have some sort of comeback. I can go back and say, well, look, this was bad advice. What do I do if AI tells me to invest in a stock that turns out to be good, or gives me outdated information, which would be actually more of a concern for me than people blindly following stockpicks or whatever from AI because stock markets, we all know you are taking a chance anyway. But if people are looking for financial guidance and they're looking for information, how do they know that the information they're getting is accurate and how do they know that it's up to date?

Ciara Kelly (2:39)

Can I just ask you as well, Ciara, like ChatGPT, people use it like a search engine, but it isn't actually strictly speaking a search engine. It's subtly different, isn't it?

Ciara O'Brien (2:48)

It is.

It's pulling data from different sources. The thing with a search engine is, you put a query into Google or into Bing or any search engine that you're using, it will give you back a list of results and you then have to go and look at those results yourself. You see the source material. A lot of the time, people are just accepting what these LLMs, these large language models, spit back at them because it's presented nicely. It's presented in kind of human language. It makes it easier for us to read and understand, but the thing is you don't actually see where that information is coming from, unless you, in some cases, unless you ask it what its sources are, and in others it will give you a list of links, but you have to actually physically go in and click those and then follow up on it yourself. So sometimes I have found my own personal experience, not necessarily with financial advice, but just in general. Sometimes ChatGPT or Gemini or any of those, Claude, will give me incorrect information and I push back on it and say, actually that's wrong because I know it's wrong. But if I don't know, and I'm relying on this for my information and my knowledge, how do you know that it's wrong? That's the thing I think that most people are missing. It's not a search engine.

Ciara Kelly (3:57)

So they present you with sort of a summary in effect, but the summary is not always accurate. Look, thank you for that, Ciara. That's Ciara O'Brien, their business and tech journalist with the Irish Times. Robert Whelan, Managing Director of Rockwell Financial Services.