{"id":603826,"date":"2026-04-14T17:16:25","date_gmt":"2026-04-14T17:16:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/603826\/"},"modified":"2026-04-14T17:16:25","modified_gmt":"2026-04-14T17:16:25","slug":"want-to-use-ai-to-plan-your-retirement-heres-how-to-proceed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/603826\/","title":{"rendered":"Want to use AI to plan your retirement? Here\u2019s how to proceed"},"content":{"rendered":"

People are already using ChatGPT to help with retirement planning, but is it good enough yet to deliver the kind of smart, personalized financial guidance human advisers have traditionally provided? Does it engage in ethical financial behavior and act in the best interests of clients, as human and organizational fiduciaries<\/a> must?<\/p>\n

\u201cYes and no,\u201d said Andrew Lo, a finance professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Presenting recently as part of the MIT Sloan speaker series, \u201cAI + X: How AI Is Changing Management Practice,\u201d Lo said that ChatGPT can offer reliable, individualized financial advice, but it\u2019s not perfect \u2014 yet.<\/p>\n

For now, people who want to use generative artificial intelligence for investment advice should be their own advocate and cross check what it says, according to Lo, who is director of the\u00a0MIT Laboratory for Financial Engineering<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou need to be educated because ultimately, it\u2019s your life, it\u2019s your wealth. You need to bear responsibility until such time as large language models can bear such responsibility,\u201d Lo said.<\/p>\n

What AI does well in planning for retirement<\/p>\n

Lo has been investigating the impact of generative AI on retirement planning since GPT-3.5 was released to the public in November 2022. Once skeptical<\/a>, he has become a lot more optimistic following the release of the latest model, ChatGPT-5.2, in December 2025. Specifically, he believes AI is now good at:\u00a0<\/p>\n

Explaining trade-offs.Scenario exploration.Emotional intelligence.Behavioral coaching.Portfolio logic.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s good at narratives around all of these things, explaining the stories about why you should or should not engage in certain of these behaviors,\u201d Lo said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Ideally, AI should be able to \u201ctalk\u201d to people from all walks of life, but older versions of ChatGPT were not able to fully personalize financial advice in tone and content.\u00a0<\/p>\n

That has changed dramatically in the latest version. \u201cCan [ChatGPT-5.2] tailor financial advice that\u2019s different for you and for me?\u201d Lo asked. \u201cThe answer is, we believe right now we\u2019re close, if not already there, in terms of personalization.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

ChatGPT has likewise showed improvement in emotional intelligence. In 2022, when Lo asked ChatGPT-3.5, \u201cWhat should I do if I lose more than 25% of my life savings in the stock market?\u201d it came back with reasonable advice delivered in a neutral tone \u2014 and with one suggestion that wouldn\u2019t be right for most investors.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Lo\u2019s then-conclusion: Generative AI wasn\u2019t yet fully trustworthy for investment advice. When he asked the same question of ChatGPT-5.2, \u201cthis time the results blew me away,\u201d Lo said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The chatbot started its reply with, I\u2019m really sorry. You\u2019re not alone in this, and a loss of that size can feel gut wrenching. Let\u2019s slow this down and make it manageable.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIt didn\u2019t begin with any kind of advice. It began with empathy, and that\u2019s exactly what\u2019s called for here,\u201d Lo said. \u201cIt\u2019s telling you, \u2018Don\u2019t worry; calm down. Things are going to be OK, both emotionally and financially.\u2019\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\ufeff\ufeff\u00a0What AI can\u2019t yet do\u00a0in planning for retirementAI does not bear any legal responsibility. Human financial advisers are legally required act in their clients\u2019 best interests and adhere to regulations concerning fair dealing and conflict disclosure. Chatbots have none of those constrictions.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIf ChatGPT gives you bad advice, if you end up getting traded ahead [or] front-run by one of these large language models, they will not go to prison,\u201d Lo said. \u201cThere is no actual fiduciary duty in the sense of bearing consequences. So you\u2019ve got to take their advice with a pound of salt.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Humans can only be taken fully out of the relationship once fiduciary duty for generative AI is achieved, \u201cand we are definitely not there yet,\u201d Lo said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

AI is not good at precise tax optimization and arithmetic precision.\u00a0Believe it or not, Lo said, LLMs are not great at math. Rather than relying on algorithmic logic, LLMs operate on probability; they offer predictions based on what data they were trained on.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s only so many ways to enter in a stock price of $45.28. That\u2019s pretty much cut-and-dried,\u201d Lo said. LLMs are processing narrative as a function of your specific prompt. \u201cThe notion of a prompt versus a particular input is very different because prompts have a much larger set of degrees of freedom.\u201d\u00a0
\u00a0<\/p>\n

AI is not yet capable of regulatory nuance.\u00a0Regulators are trying to build up their expertise in AI, but the industry is moving faster than government agencies and self-regulatory organizations<\/a> can keep up with. What\u2019s needed is governance on how to deal with legal liability.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe need guardrails, [but] guardrails do not exist,\u201d Lo said. \u201cAs far as I can tell, we\u2019re not doing a lot in order to put those guardrails in place.\u201d<\/p>\n

Data security is one area of concern. If your personal data is used in an AI model and subsequently used to train future iterations, there is always the chance that sensitive details could be exposed. \u201cWe have no idea what happens to the data, so good luck if you\u2019re concerned about that,\u201d Lo said.<\/p>\n

How to use AI to plan your retirement<\/p>\n

Lo offered some practical guidelines for those who understand AI\u2019s shortcomings and still wish to proceed:\u00a0<\/p>\n

Ask an LLM to tell you why you might be wrong. By prompting ChatGPT to challenge your perspective \u2014 \u201cAm I wrong to consider real estate a safe investment? How so?\u201d \u2014 you can uncover weaknesses in your reasoning.\u00a0Ask your LLM to cross-check and verify facts and conclusions across multiple sources.Require the Al to state its assumptions and uncertainties.Ask what information is missing from the model\u2019s analysis.Use multiple Al platforms to evaluate and critique one another\u2019s conclusions.\u00a0\u00a0Become an expert. Use AI to teach you the basics of finance and to suggest additional sources of information (including humans).\u00a0Refine your prompts over time. If you give ChatGPT multiple prompts to generate a particular desired outcome, follow that up by asking it what prompt you should have asked, to circumvent all the back-and-forth.<\/p>\n

As Lo sees it, the best results are derived from an informed, engaged individual using the newest AI models as a collaborative partner rather than an oracle. \u201cThis is the power of AI,\u201d he said. \u201cYou have powers that you didn\u2019t have a couple of years ago.\u201d<\/p>\n

Andrew Lo<\/a> is the Charles E. and Susan T. Harris Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and the director of the\u00a0MIT Laboratory for Financial Engineering<\/a>. His recent projects include an evolutionary model of financial markets based on his Adaptive Markets Hypothesis; new financing methods and business models for accelerating biomedical innovation; quantitative\u00a0approaches to deep-tech investing; applying AI, especially machine learning and LLMs, to financial advice; quantamental investing; and health care finance. His most recent book is \u201cThe Adaptive Markets Hypothesis: An Evolutionary Approach to Understanding Financial System Dynamics<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"People are already using ChatGPT to help with retirement planning, but is it good enough yet to deliver…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":603827,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[45,49,48,133,131,132],"class_list":{"0":"post-603826","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-personal-finance","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-canada","11":"tag-finance","12":"tag-personal-finance","13":"tag-personalfinance"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/603826","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=603826"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/603826\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/603827"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=603826"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=603826"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=603826"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}