MARKETS

AI brings wealth building to non-millionaires

The wealth management business is pretty simple: Help clients manage their finances in exchange for a fee, which is often based on the client’s assets under management. 

The problem with this setup, according to Joe Percoco, co-founder of investment management startup Titan, is that it incentivizes wealth managers to take on only high-net-worth clients, leaving wealth management services out of reach for younger or less wealthy people (wealth management account minimums can run into the millions).

But AI can give wealth managers “super powers,” making it feasible to service more than just wealthy customers, Percoco said. AI can handle the client life cycle by collecting client information, understanding the client’s situation, considering solutions, and making recommendations. These efficiency gains could unlock the kind of broad access typically available only through brokerages, rather than registered investment advisors (RIAs). 

“The tools of AI actually enable that to truly democratize for the first time ever, meaning a kid coming out of college can actually have the same quality of advice, capabilities, and price point of a Goldman Sachs private wealth manager,” Percoco said.

Still, Percoco doesn’t foresee the human being taken out of the equation.

“We're not too optimistic of people who just throw AI slop at, in theory, one of the highest trust use cases in all of consumer [business],” Percoco said. “We actually don't believe that's gonna work, nor do we think the capabilities are there for consumers to truly trust it.” The question, for Percoco, isn’t whether a human will be the one managing clients’ wealth. The question is how many clients can each human take on — 100 or 5,000?

Titan’s vision of modernized wealth management earned it the backing of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. And fellow VC giant Sequoia recently bet on another AI wealth management firm, Nevis. Vertical AI startups have taken off in the legal and medical worlds, and a race is shaping up in the personal finance vertical.

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MARKETS

Can you trust AI for financial advice?

As AI becomes increasingly integrated into consumers’ lives, more people are turning to AI tools for financial information or advice. 

An Intuit Credit Karma survey showed 66% of generative AI users used chatbots for financial advice, and the figure rose above 80% for millennial and Gen-Z users. But while people are asking AI about their finances, they don’t always trust what they hear. In the Intuit Survey, 80% of respondents said they did additional research before acting on AI’s advice. And a Northwestern Mutual survey found that people trusted people more than AI to perform a variety of financial planning and budget management tasks.

Jake Eaton, senior partnership manager at Circle, said he views AI as powerful for his personal finances, but only in a few ways. AI can formalize his thoughts and financial goals, but Eaton said he wouldn’t want the AI to act on the information. He would also use AI to implement an automated trading strategy he wouldn’t want to do himself, offering an automated Polymarket strategy as an example. 

Finally, Eaton said, he would accept AI advising and automated trading if performed under the auspices of a reputable company like Robinhood. Notably, many investment platforms already perform versions of this, where robo-advisers factor in user risk appetites and financial goals to automatically rebalance portfolios.

So while AI has become a financial tool, particularly for young people, people still seem hesitant to take humans out of the driver’s seat. As Titan co-founder Joe Percoco pointed out, finance is arguably the highest-trust sector in the consumer economy, so the bar is high.

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MARKETS

For some young people, AI is the ‘daily driver’

For young people using AI to think through their finances, retail trading is increasingly likely to come up in conversation.

Retail investing flows grew by 50% between 2023 and 2025, according to JPMorgan data, and investment platform adoption has seen a sharp uptick among people in their twenties. Increasingly, these young investors form their trading strategies with the help of chatbots.

“We're seeing people using Surf as their daily driver for investment advice for how they want to find opportunities in crypto markets,” Ryan Li, co-founder and CEO of AI crypto trading platform Surf, said. He added that Surf uses custom models in which the data input is curated, so the AI produces higher-quality outputs for users — and, in theory, hallucinates less. 

If Harvey and Open Evidence can be valued in the billions for domain-specific AI businesses, then a similar business could be sold to traders, Li said. He also argued that Surf’s AI model can surface insights and strategies that users couldn’t otherwise find.

And if AI trading companions are going to have legs, fine-tuned vertical startups may be needed, because whether it’s trading or running a vending machine, frontier models aren’t always the best with money.

It seems clear that as Zoomers and Millennials age, AI’s importance to their personal finances will only grow. If Percoco’s thesis is correct, AI will help democratize financial services and basic financial literacy. That’s assuming, of course, that the onset of highly advanced AI doesn’t condemn most young people to the permanent underclass.

LINKS

• Meta acquires Chinese AI startup Manus for undisclosed sum

• Google has released its Year in Search trends for 2025

• The AI debate over jobs and data centers is heating up in the US

• Geoffrey Hinton predicts AI will replace a lot more jobs in 2026

• Andrew Ng shines the spotlight on AI’s limitations

• Lou Gerstner, former IBM CEO credited for it’s turnaround, dies at 83

• Nvidia has taken a $5 billion stake in Intel as part of September agreement

• AbleMouse AI edition: An open-source tool for computer vision-powered mouse control.

• Lighthouz AI: A billing automation platform for freight brokers.

• /agent by Firecrawl: An API that navigates, and gathers data from complex websites.

• Microsoft: Partner AI Architect - Generative AI & AI Agents

• IBM: AI Architect

• Mistral: Lead Software Engineer

• Meta: Software Engineer, Infrastructure

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POLL RESULTS

Do you expect to have an agent doing work for you in 2026?

Yes, I'm already using AI agents(33%)
Yes, I can't wait to start using AI agents (30%)
No, I'll believe AI agents when I see them (20%)
Other (17%)