Asking ChatGPT about money feels a little like Googling your symptoms when you’re feeling ill. Plenty of people do it, and few admit it. Surveys suggest more than half of adults in the US and UK have used an AI chatbot for financial guidance, which may already be more than the share who consult a human advisor.

Researchers from MIT Sloan and Stanford have now tested whether the habit is a dangerous one, by simulating what happens when people follow a chatbot’s financial advice to plan their money management years into the future. The advice was better than expected. Its quality, though, depends heavily on how you ask.

What The Researchers Did

The study, released in March 2026, took an unusual approach. Instead of writing test questions themselves, the researchers asked 1,000 adults to write real prompts describing their finances and asking for spending and investment advice.

They fed those prompts to ChatGPT (GPT-5.2) and Google’s Gemini, then simulated what would happen to each person’s wealth from age 22 to retirement if they followed the advice every year, through pay rises, job losses and market crashes.

What Chatbots Can Get Right

For most people in the study, following the advice would leave them better off than carrying on as they were. The models consistently told people to build an emergency fund, to invest in diversified funds rather than individual shares, and to take less risk as they got older. Over 99% of simulated individuals ended up in the stock market, with only small amounts in gold, crypto or single stocks. This is broadly what a good financial planner would tell you, minus the fee.

“We were somewhat surprised by how good the advice was,” said Taha Choukhmane, the MIT Sloan professor who co-authored the study. The researchers had worried the models would simply tell people what they wanted to hear. They mostly did not.

Where Chatbots Make Mistakes

The advice wasn’t so helpful when people asked about major life events.. When a simulated person lost their job, the chatbot told them to cut spending sharply, even when they had an emergency fund sitting there for exactly that purpose. It leaned on simple rules of thumb, such as saving a fixed percentage of income, instead of adjusting to changing circumstances.

It almost never told anyone to rebalance their investments, letting portfolios drift wherever the market took them. And in retirement, it had people spending too little, leaving money unspent that they could safely have used.

How The Questions You Ask Improve Advice

When the researchers replaced people’s casual questions with detailed, structured prompts stating age, income, employment status and financial goals, the advice improved markedly. As Choukhmane put it, “Regular people are not writing their prompts the way a finance professor is.”

Prompts written by women, and by people with lower financial literacy, produced advice that led to roughly 4% to 5% less wealth at retirement. About two thirds of the shortfall in money at retirement came from the questions people asked. The remaining third came from the model itself, which gave different advice to the same question depending on who appeared to be asking. The researchers note that the same pattern shows up with human financial advisors, so this is not a uniquely AI problem.

How To Ask ChatGPT About Money

Give the chatbot the same information you would give a human advisor. State your age, your take-home pay, your commitments (car loan, PTPTN, rent), your EPF balance, how much you have in savings, and whether anyone depends on your income. A prompt like “I am 31, take home RM5,200 a month, pay RM750 for a car loan and RM1,400 rent in Cheras, and have RM8,000 in savings” will get far more useful advice than “where should I invest RM200 a month”. Then ask it what could go wrong if you followed its own advice.

Be careful before treating ChatGPT as your personal financial planner. First, this is an American study. The simulations used US taxes and US retirement accounts, so anything the chatbot tells you about tax reliefs, EPF or local products needs checking against Malaysian sources. Second, ChatGPT is not licensed to give financial advice in Malaysia. For big decisions, such as a home loan or your retirement plan, a licensed financial planner is still worth the money.

Used properly, though, the chatbot earns its place. The researchers themselves suggest treating it as a way to build financial knowledge and test your own thinking, rather than as an advisor to follow blindly. It knows some textbook answers, it’s free, and unlike your uncle, it will not repeat its investment tips at every family dinner.

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