[Reporter's Notebook] In the AI Era, the Financial Knowledge Gap Becomes a Wealth Gap

"People who know what to ask can get ten answers from one question, while those who don't may not even know what to ask."

That is what a financial industry official told a reporter recently. The age has arrived in which anyone can get professional financial advice through artificial intelligence (AI), but the technology that was expected to narrow the financial knowledge gap may instead widen it.

The importance of asking questions has come to the fore as the use of AI agents expands across the financial sector. AI agents have become deeply involved in users' financial lives, interacting with them to compare financial products and even assess their personal financial situations. The more deeply AI is involved in individuals' financial decisions, the more we need to consider the possibility that the quality of its advice may vary according to users' knowledge levels.

In one example, when someone asked a financial firm's AI, "Can you recommend a savings account that suits me?" it listed four products. But when the person specified the savings period, deposit amount, and whether early withdrawals might be needed, the AI recommended one product that matched those conditions. In response to the initial question, the AI did not even ask about additional requirements. This illustrates how the advice AI provides can vary depending on how specific the information supplied by the user is.

Research findings also support this point. In a paper published in August by a joint research team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Stanford University, about 1,000 adults wrote questions for AI about their personal financial lives. The researchers simulated how their assets would change if they followed the AI's advice over an extended period.

The results showed differences according to financial knowledge and experience using AI. The researchers estimated that, several decades later, the assets of people with limited financial knowledge who followed the AI advice they received would be about 4% lower than those of people with greater financial knowledge who followed the advice they received. This suggests that differences in how people use AI may affect their financial outcomes over the long term.

Ultimately, differences in financial knowledge lie behind this gap. People with greater understanding of financial matters tended to ask more specific questions, while those with less understanding tended not to provide enough important information. A gap has emerged in how people use AI between those who know what factors to consider and those who do not.

AI has expanded access to financial information, but ensuring that its benefits are shared equally remains a challenge. Rather than providing more in-depth advice to people who already have extensive financial knowledge, AI may be more urgently needed to help people with limited financial knowledge identify the information they need and make informed choices.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.