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One in Four Americans Ask AI Chatbots About Personal Finance, Gen Z Loses the Most
A new NerdWallet and Harris Poll survey finds 26 percent of Americans have already asked AI chatbots about their finances, with 27 percent of Gen Z investors losing more than $100 as a result. Experts warn that a chatbot's confident tone doesn't mean its advice is accurate.
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More people are turning first to ChatGPT or Gemini instead of a financial advisor or accountant. New data show this is now a mass phenomenon, especially among the youngest adults, and it doesn't always end well.
How widespread it is
The survey, conducted by Harris Poll on behalf of NerdWallet on June 23-24, 2026, covered 2,003 adult Americans, of whom 496 said they had used an AI chatbot for financial questions. The margin of error is 2.7 percentage points at a 95 percent confidence level. The results show that asking AI about money has stopped being a novelty and become a daily habit for nearly half of these tool's users - 49 percent of them had asked a chatbot about money within the past week.
The most common reason for turning to a chatbot, cited by half of respondents, is wanting a quick answer. Next come not wanting to search multiple websites (35 percent), expecting a judgment-free answer (28 percent), and embarrassment about asking another person (12 percent). For 22 percent of respondents, a chatbot is simply cheaper than a paid advisor.
Gen Z Loses More
The most troubling numbers concern the youngest users. According to a 2025 survey by Pearl.com covering 2,000 adult Americans, 19 percent of respondents lost more than $100 after following a chatbot's financial advice. Among Gen Z investors, that share jumped to 27 percent, meaning nearly one in three young investors using AI lost real money.
This lines up with earlier Credit Karma research, which found that more than 80 percent of Gen Z and millennial AI users said the advice they received had helped, while at the same time more than half of respondents ended up making a bad financial decision or a mistake as a result. According to that data, Gen Z and millennials are the group most likely to turn to AI for money matters.
Why Confidence Misleads
Pawan Jain, a finance professor at the University of Michigan, points to three mechanisms in his analysis that make AI financial advice especially risky. The first is confusing fluency with accuracy - an answer that sounds professional and confident isn't necessarily suited to the asker's specific financial situation, since the model doesn't know all the relevant tax, asset, or family details of that person.
Fluency is not accuracy. People naturally read a confident and well-articulated answer as competent - Pawan Jain, professor of finance, University of Michigan
The problem is compounded by the fact that language models have no fiduciary duty to the user, unlike licensed financial advisors. A chatbot bears no legal liability for the quality of its recommendations, and a study published in the Journal of Financial Planning in June 2026 found that recommendations from different AI platforms vary significantly from one another, and in some cases also depend on the race or gender of the hypothetical user described in the query.
Personal Data at Risk
Beyond the quality of the advice itself, there's the question of what users reveal in conversation with AI. The NerdWallet survey shows that 77 percent of people using financial chatbots shared some form of personal data with them. 9 percent entered a Social Security number, 10 percent a bank account number, 15 percent uploaded bank or credit card statements, and 14 percent uploaded health insurance documentation.
Even more concerning, 20 percent of users acted on a chatbot's recommendation immediately, without any verification from a person or another source. With 55 percent of respondents expressing doubts about AI's financial competence, yet only 45 percent willing to trust it, the gap between stated distrust and actual behavior is stark.
What This Means for Poland
Poland doesn't yet have comparable data at this scale, but the trend of using AI for everyday financial decisions, budgeting, saving, choosing banking products, is growing alongside the American market. Polish financial regulators, like the European regulators cited in existing analyses, don't yet have unified standards for verifying the reliability of generative AI systems used in financial services, which in practice means the responsibility for a bad piece of advice falls on the user.
For banks and fintechs, this data sends a double signal. On one hand, demand for AI assistants built into apps for budget management will keep growing, especially among younger customers accustomed to asking chatbots questions instead of reading terms and conditions. On the other, the scale of losses and sensitive data disclosed raises the question of who is responsible when an AI assistant provided by a bank gets a recommendation wrong.
Experts cited in the American analyses repeat one piece of advice: treat a chatbot as a starting point for financial education, not a replacement for an advisor. Asking about general savings principles or getting an explanation of a term like ETF is one thing; pasting your bank statement into AI and asking what to do with your life savings is another.
