Few Americans confident in financial advice from AI: Gallup

As artificial intelligence’s influence continues to grow in the United States, fewer Americans trust the technology’s financial advice, with only trusting social media influencers falling below it.

An Edward Jones-Gallup poll released Wednesday showed only 27 percent of respondents had “some” or “a great deal” of trust in AI as a source of financial guidance, but 73 percent trusted it “not much” or “none at all.”

Americans were most confident in financial advisers with 79 percent trusting the professionals “some” or “a great deal.” The lowest category was social media influencers with 86 percent of Americans having “not much” or “none at all” trust in the group.

Among Americans who have sought financial advice, 18 percent received advice from artificial intelligence tools while 73 percent used their own internet research. 

“AI seems to be nudging people in the right direction,” Tim de Silva, an assistant professor of finance at Stanford Graduate School of Business, said in an interview about his paper on AI use for financial advice. “It’s not perfect, but it’s better than the way many people make decisions, such as talking to friends and family or doing simple internet searches. 

“That’s not something that should be taken for granted: It’s not at all obvious LLMs would provide good financial advice, because the way they are trained has nothing to do with that objective,” he continued.

The poll arrives at a time when AI is beginning to replace customer service jobs. Uber cut about 10 percent of its customer support team, while Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff credited AI with allowing the company to remove 4,000 customer support roles. 

American optimism in the technology has generally declined; another Gallup poll reported that 39 percent of respondents said AI does more harm than good.

This follows a July incident at OpenAI in which two of its newest models gained access to the internet and broke into Hugging Face’s database in what the company called an “unprecedented” event.

A new employee-led initiative, which asks the U.S. government to “deliberately pace” frontier AI development, has gained traction and is now backed by Anthropic and OpenAI.

The Edward Jones-Gallup survey took place March 20 to April 6. It surveyed 5,075 American adults and has a margin of sampling error of 1.8 percentage points.