Dad jokes, AI and pensions.
So lovely to spend some time with my parents last week, which meant a steady stream of dad jokes, the top trending one being “just ask AI” after seeing that I now sit and chat with it (my chief of staff, him/her/they, feels wrong to call it ‘it’, yes I may have some attachment issues!). And as always, we also ended up talking about his pension (of course, I never give him “advice” 😉): what he wants to do with it and how he plans to use it.
Both topics feel very relevant to what’s been happening in the industry lately.
More money moving with the same level of help
The FCA’s latest figures show more money moving with the same level of help:
- £91.2bn was taken out of pensions last year, up more than a fifth on the year before
- Nearly 1 in 11 pots accessed last year were worth £250k or more, up from 1 in 20 two years ago
- The share of people taking regulated advice hasn’t moved, at about 1 in 10
So more people are making bigger, often irreversible decisions on their own. And, I wonder how many of them are now asking AI about their pension decision? I know customers are using it for finances more broadly and to make stronger complaints to firms, so would they stop at this decision?
PensionBee tested what they’d hear back by asking Copilot, ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude 45 real saver questions, three times each:
- 1 in 10 answers could have led someone to lose money or make a mistake they can’t undo
- Most of those risky answers missed something important, like the rule that you need regulated advice before transferring a final salary pension worth over £30,000
- The riskiest answers came up around big life events, and when the chatbot couldn’t tell which part of the UK someone lived in
- Ask the same chatbot the same question three times and there was only a 48% chance of a fully correct answer every time
And, even aside from right or wrong, an answer can be correct and still leave someone with the wrong idea about a decision they only get to make once.
AI can make everyday questions quicker and easier, and it belongs in customer journeys (IMO). The work is in knowing which moments in someone’s financial life need a person, and making sure one is there when they do.
So, after a week of constant jesting, I’ll concede my dad has half a point. Sometimes “just ask AI” is the right answer, and sometimes it really isn’t.
If you design retirement journeys, where are you drawing that line?