Around 382,000 unadvised adults are acting on financial guidance from AI tools, with around £47.4bn in assets between them, according to new research.
The level of assets under advice by AI puts it on a par with the £40bn advised via network True Potential or the £50bn of assets held on the Aviva platform.
The 2026 Advice Gap study from TheLangCat found that 24% of adults have asked an AI tool about their personal finances in the past two years, with 13% doing so several times a year or more.
Among those using AI for financial advice, 31% asked about investments, 18% about investing for retirement and 16% about pensions more generally.
Use of AI for financial questions over the past two years fell steadily with age, from 35% of 18 to 24 year olds down to 12% of the over 55s.
Younger users were also the most willing to act without a second opinion: 22% of 18 to 24 year olds have acted on an AI answer without checking it anywhere else. That compares to 13% of all users and 4% of over 55s.
A recent report from operating systems provider Saturn found that AI models such as ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Grok and Gemini give wrong answers to financial inquiries on average 57% of the time.
Amal Jolly, CEO of Saturn, sponsors of LangCat report, said: “It’s easier than ever for people to access what they think is financial advice through mainstream AI models. But our separate research showed how poorly LLMs perform in financial advice tasks, and £47.4bn is a lot of money subject to inconsistent help that’s wrong more than half the time. The effect this will have on the advice market and consumer outcomes is unknown, but more needs to be done to protect people.
“The opportunity for advice firms in this uncertainty is to meet the demand with professional, regulated advice, rather than leave it to an unregulated, general-purpose chatbot.”
The survey found that four in five less-experienced investors aged 18-40 have used AI to help with investing, but only 40% of consumers correctly recognise that there is no recourse if something goes wrong after acting on advice from a general-purpose AI tool.
TheLangCat and YouGov surveyed 2,088 UK adults in July.
The £47.4bn estimate applies the FCA’s most recent Financial Lives data alongside the research with YouGov to calculate, by age segmentation, those who do not take regulated advice, use AI to help them with their investment decisions and then act on that information.