AI is one of the most influential advisers in the UK, with tools shaping financial decisions over an estimated £47.7bn of UK savings and investments, the lang cat has stated.

The estimate, which is part of its 2026 Advice Gap study, covers 382,000 unadvised adults who have asked an AI tool about an area a financial planner would usually handle and then acted on the answer.

The specialist financial services consultancy said, for context, the estimated figure is being guided on by AI sits behind the £69bn managed by Evelyn Partners, and ahead of the £40bn advised on by True Potential.

Of the consumers surveyed by YouGov for The Advice Gap, sponsored by Saturn, 24% have asked AI about their personal finances in the past two years, and of those, 13% do so several times a year or more.

Among those users, 31% asked about investments, 18% about investing for retirement and 16% about pensions more generally.

The study comes after Saturn’s recent report into the effectiveness of the most popular large language models found AI models such as ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Grok and Gemini gave wrong answers to financial inquiries on average 57% of the time.

Use for 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 those aged 55 and over.

Younger users are the most willing to act without a second options, with 22% of 18 to 24 year olds ahave acted on an AI answer without checking it anywhere else. This compares to 13% of all users and 4% of over 55s.

CEO at Saturn, Amal Jolly, stated: "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."

CEO at the lang cat, Mark Polson, added: "Nobody expected one of the most influential financial advisers in the UK would be built by a few non-financial services companies with no regulated permissions that weren’t trying to disrupt this market. But that’s where we are.

"AI is an incomprehensibly impactful wildcard in financial advice. And that’s because we just don’t know the effect it will have over the next 5 to 10 years. What we do know for certain is how much people value their financial adviser and the peace of mind their financial planning gives them."

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