Ask most investors whether they would trust a chatbot with their retirement savings, and the answer, overwhelmingly, is no. Ask whether they have already used one for financial advice, and a surprising number say yes.
That contradiction sits at the heart of a warning from one of the most prominent figures in financial engineering. Andrew Lo, director of the Laboratory for Financial Engineering at the MIT Sloan School of Management, told CNBC on Monday that AI already has the financial knowledge to replace human advisers. What it does not have is a legal obligation to act in anyone's best interest.
