Americans Are Asking AI About Their Money — And Mostly Not Believing It

Americans are increasingly turning to artificial intelligence for help with their money, even though most of them don't trust the answers they get.

That's the takeaway from new polling covered this week by multiple outlets. According to Scripps News, some US adults are using AI for financial guidance, but few trust it. The Boston Herald reported the same poll findings under a nearly identical framing: people are consulting AI tools about their finances while withholding confidence in what those tools tell them.

Both reports describe the same basic tension rather than a contradiction. Using a tool and trusting a tool are different things. A person might ask a chatbot to explain how a Roth IRA works, or to sketch out a budget, without treating the response as advice they'd act on unquestioningly — the same way someone might read a forum post or a random article without assuming it's gospel.

The available coverage doesn't spell out which specific tasks people are handing to AI, how large the gap between usage and trust is, or which chatbots are involved. What it does establish is the direction: adoption is running ahead of confidence.

That gap is the part worth watching. Financial decisions — debt, retirement, taxes, investing — carry consequences that are slow to show up and hard to reverse, and unlike a bad recipe or a botched email draft, a wrong answer here can cost real money. If people keep using tools they say they don't trust, the question shifts from whether AI belongs in personal finance to how much verification sits between the chatbot's answer and the user's bank account.