Listen: How AI Can Help with Personal Finance

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This is Play That Back, where we spotlight conversations from our main show that are worth a second look.

AI is everywhere right now, in our feeds, at our jobs, and honestly, in half the headlines we scroll past before we've even had coffee. But when it comes to our money, the big question is, “Is AI actually useful or just another buzzword we're supposed to pretend we understand?”

That's why we wanted to bring back this conversation with Ida Pierce from AI Ready RVA. She breaks down what AI really is, how everyday people can use it as a brainstorming partner, and where the line is when it comes to keeping your personal information safe. Ida also shares some surprisingly practical ways AI could evolve inside our banking tools. Think gentle nudges, smarter insights, and a little more confidence when you're planning for the future.

It's clear, it's grounded, and it'll make the whole AI and personal finance thing feel a lot less intimidating. So enough from me. Let's play that back.

We are so excited today to have Ida Pierce with us to discuss AI and its impacts on personal finance. Thank you for joining us. Tell us a little bit about yourself and your business and how it relates to AI.

Thank you. I'm Ida Pierce. My business is Pierce Creative and Consulting, and I'm a certified consultant in AI for business transformation. I specialize in helping organizations get comfortable with new technologies and innovative processes. Essentially, I guide leaders and teams through the human side of adopting things like AI, improving talent management, and making their workflows smoother and more innovative.

So I'm here today to chat with you all about how AI can fit into personal finance and everyday life.

Alright. You mentioned AI Ready RVA. What is that?

Yeah. So AI Ready RVA is a nonprofit in Richmond, Virginia. But our mission is so much bigger than that, right? We are a group of volunteers, professionals, and people who are just interested in this emerging technology.

The mission of the organization is to enhance AI literacy in the region and across the state. And so, as a nonprofit group, we bring together individuals in different specific interest areas. And we do that through a cohort model where we have specific cohorts of interest. So you may join our Money & Finance Cohort, where you're interested in hearing from professionals and experts and just everyday people who are incorporating these tools into their life or into their work based on that subject matter.

I'm a co-lead for the AI Governance Cohort, which really leans into the responsible and ethical use of these AI tools and the impact on our society and what we should be thinking about as human beings, as parents, as employees for corporations, or maybe even as business owners. And we have a Women & AI Cohort. We have cohorts focused in health care. We have cohorts for our veterans.

And so it really is this robust group of people in the community who have come together around this topic. And, you know, our goal is to make Richmond and our region the most AI ready region in the state.

Yeah. So how can I learn more? How can I actually get involved in that movement?

Yeah. Great question. We have a website, it's aireadyrva.com. I encourage everyone to just go out, take a look at the events that we hold, some of the opportunities that we create for people to come in and learn, whether you want to build an AI agent for yourself, or whether you just want to lean into one of the topics that I mentioned previously. We also have various events that we are at around town where we're coming through to talk to people about how they may enhance their literacy around the topic of AI.

And it's just a great group of people. AIreadyRVA.com.

Going there now.

Yeah. There you go. Feel free to join us.

Excited to learn more about it. And this topic is very, very hot right now. And, you know, your knowledge on this in this area is so valuable to us. And thank you for taking time to share it with our members. We really do appreciate it.

Absolutely. I'm happy to be here. I really, you're right. This topic is very hot right now.

It is in every industry. It's a big part of our world, even in our personal lives. The topic of generative AI. AI has been around for a really long time, but the recent advancements, the more recent advancements, because, I'll say within the past two to three years, it's really been an explosion in this conversation, right?

But it's timely, and so I'm glad to be here to speak with you all.

So tell us, how did you get involved in this area of AI?

Oh, so I'm a technologist as a hobby but also by career, and so I built my career working within technology teams, primarily in the spaces of innovation, process, and emerging technologies. And so I found myself, you know, we all have our college story, right, and what we thought we wanted to do when we went to college and what we studied. And I entered college as a computer science major, and I very quickly understood that the zeros and the ones weren't exactly where I wanted to focus. But I knew that technology was interesting, that there were all of these advancements that were being made, and it was really exciting.

And in my first role, I really came to learn that, yes, technology is great, it's exciting, it's innovative, but how people adopt those technologies are really the area that interested me and where I wanted to focus. And so that led me to navigate a career within many different teams, but I really became like the trainer. Right? The person that could speak with people who now need to adopt a new system and explain to them, you know, in a relatable way, like, how you use this technology, how it's incorporated into your process and into your day-to-day.

And I saw a lot of people with a lot of apprehension and fear about what does this mean for my job, for my role, am I—am I being pushed away, am I being eliminated? And so I found this really sweet spot of really wanting to know these technologies that, you know, were being pushed into organizations or that people were using for their day-to-day lives, but being able to explain them in ways that help people understand what it means to them. Yeah. Right?

Because it doesn't mean the same thing to everyone. Some people are very technical, and they want to know the inner workings, and they want to be able to build the beautiful thing. There are some people who are just like, “No, I want to be able to use it in a meaningful way and for what you know, what its purpose is, but I don't necessarily need to know all the technical.” So, I like to think that I'm the person who can kind of sit in the middle and speak both languages.

How lucky are we to have you today?

Thank you.

So for our members, they might just be, you know, starting to venture out in the world of AI, and then we might just, as you said, have more, you know, people that are more familiar with it. But when people even hear AI, and then we think about personal finance as well, what is that even? What is AI in personal finance?

Yeah.

So I think about AI and what it means to personal finance as just another tool—okay—in my toolbox. So, you know, I'll keep it personal.

Yeah. Give us an example an actual AI tool. Yeah. For personal.

So, like, we can talk about some of the most common kind of generative AI tools that exist. Like, everyone's heard of ChatGPT, right? Everyone's heard of some of those other tools like Claude or Gemini that exist. A lot of times, we can use those tools for free.

And if we want a little bit more sauce, right, we can sign up for the subscription, get more functionality, right? So, perfect example, let's just stick with ChatGPT. It is a tool that you can essentially brainstorm with, right? And so maybe you have a financial goal, or you are trying to get even better with budgeting, right?

I look at Chat, something like ChatGPT, as an enhanced Google search, right? Okay. Because essentially what AI is is a collection of data. All of the books and articles and websites that have existed up until a certain point in time, and they're all put into a model that in, on the back end, right, for us nontechnical folks, it's all that data and information is put into a model.

And so when I'm prompting ChatGPT with my question about my budget or my savings plan, it is searching through this expansive amount of data and recognizing this pattern in the language and the question that I've asked, and it's bringing back the most logical response.

Okay. Right? So give us an example of that, a specific. Yeah.

So I might say, “Hey, ChatGPT, I have this goal where I want to save, you know, two thousand dollars so that I can go on this trip with my friends. However, I have a budget that I'm trying to stay within, and I have some future goals as well. I want to buy a house, and I want to have a substantial emergency savings.” So I can tell ChatGPT, “Hey, here is my monthly salary, here are my expenses.”

I'm not, of course, going to connect my bank account or connect any of my personal information, but I'm going to give enough information that I can now use ChatGPT to be my brainstorming partner. So ChatGPT might come back and say, “Well, based on the amount of money that you make and what you've told me your goals are, and I understand that you have these expenses, here are some ideas for how you might reduce your expenses so that you can save more.” Or, “Here's an idea for how you may even create another stream of income that will help you to achieve these goals quicker.” Right?

So it's almost like you're giving a little bit of information here and there, you're receiving a response, and then you're continuing to work through that information. And what I found is that nine times out of ten, there is some sort of suggestion or recommendation that comes back within that tool that makes me think a little bit differently about what my approach is or what type of questions I need to ask. I will caveat and say that, you know, I don't consider ChatGPT to be the financial expert. Right?

Right. I'm using it as a brainstorming partner to potentially learn more information, help me with, maybe, some terms that I don't understand, and then I'm going to take that information that I have and those ideas that I have now, and I'm going to go and talk to a professional. So it can also help me have better conversations.

Yes, that's where we would want you to come and talk to us about your needs when it came to products or borrowing money or things like that. You still need real people—that's right—for a lot of those processes. Absolutely. You need the professionals or the experts, the people who have been, you know, within the field doing this role, supporting people through their financial goals for years and years. I see AI as a tool that we can use to help us have better conversations, right?

Absolutely. To help us kind of—To guide us. To guide us. Exactly.

Yeah. So can a person take, let's say they have an actual Excel budget themselves, can they take that and upload it to ChatGPT? They absolutely can.

I don't recommend it if it has really personal identifying information in it, but sure, ChatGPT or, or a lot of the other tools that exist will allow you to upload a document, a picture, you know, spreadsheets, whatever that is, PDF document, that you want to upload.

I give this example all the time when I'm training about AI in personal finance. So the tool has the ability to interrogate the information within that document and then respond to you based on whatever question you have. Right? So in your example of the Excel spreadsheet, you upload that budget, and you can ask ChatGPT, “Hey, take a look at my budget. How am I doing for the past three months? Are there any recommendations that you have for how I can manage this better?” Right? Or, “What should I change?”

Or, “How should I think about a year from now once I've met my first goal?” Right? And so ChatGPT or whichever tool will interrogate that information and provide some recommendations for you. The other thing that is really cool about uploading documents is, and this is a personal step that I took, I have a daughter who's in middle school, and, as I continue to learn about my finances and being more responsible and planning for the future, I was really interested in the Invest529. Okay.

Virginia's option for savers, yes. Yeah, for savers. And I went on to the website, and I started to, you know, read through and try to get information and make sense of everything. And then I came across the resources tab that had all of these PDF documents.

And I said, “You know what I'm going to do? I'm going to load all these PDF documents in here into my AI tool. I'm going to ask some very specific questions. I'm going to use this as my brainstorming partner to help me make some decisions on whether or not this is the right plan for our family, what steps we should take, what we should think about, what are the tax implications.”

And so I'm really confident in doing that and knowing that the guidance that I'm getting is coming directly from those PDF documents. More so than just, you know, this big huge database full of information. I'm specifically asking it to interrogate the documents that I've uploaded to give me responses based on those. I love that. So, all of those examples.

I think oftentimes we do. We go, we think, “Okay, I need to save more for my kid's college.” And we have that good intention, and then we land on the website, and we're like, “Oh my goodness, there are so many choices. There are so many different accounts that you can open.” And it can be very overwhelming. So I love the idea of grabbing that information and then getting recommendations, but then also taking that back, and you can talk to a professional about that to make sure that that is the best thing when it comes to taxes and, you know, your overall financial goals as well.

Now you mentioned something earlier when we were talking about uploading documents about, you know, maybe not identifying information, right?

Sure.

I think there is a fine line, and there's fear, I think legitimate fear, when it comes to AI around “Oh, am I giving, what information should I give?” And, you know, “Can it be used against me if I put it into this chatbot?”

Yeah. So this is a part of this conversation that's always very near and dear to my heart. So, you know, I always lean into responsible and ethical use of AI tools or just governance around AI, period, and so much so that I'm a part of a community organization called AI Ready RVA, and I'm one of the co-leads for the AI Governance Cohort.

And this is a meeting group where people can come together and really lean into this topic around safety, responsible use, ethical use of AI tools. Now, this community organization has a lot of other cohorts. We can talk about it if you want to. But specifically on this conversation, how to keep ourselves safe, what we should and should not do, what that means not only for us in our personal lives but in the organizations that we work for, maybe even the businesses that we're building.

And so I always like to provide a couple of really key things that we should think about when we’re using AI tools, I’m leaning in on this. Okay. So, definitely don't share your Social Security numbers, any account details, any login information. You want to keep your information general.

It's almost like, you know, you can say things like, “I have credit card debt at twenty percent,” versus, “My credit card is, you know, this company and, with this bank, and it's—" you know, you don't want to provide all of that information as you are brainstorming with this tool because you want to keep your information and your data safe, your identity safe. You always want to use trusted tools, and so that could be a kind of a loaded statement, right? But what I mean by trusted tools are tools that you are familiar with, that you've read the terms and conditions, that you've taken the time to understand what this tool is doing, how this tool is storing data or information about you, how that data or information is being used potentially in other parts of that tool.

So you want to stick to reputable AI platforms, ideally ones that, you know, your bank or your financial institution also trusts. And so, or they already have trust or some sort of agreement in place. And you definitely want to avoid some of those random, like, AI finance apps that are out there. Right?

They might promise you fast results, but they might not exactly explain to you how your data is being stored or how your data is being used. The last recommendation I'll share is that most of these tools have a feature where you're able to turn off your data sharing when possible. And so many AI tools give you this option to disable your chat history or data used for training. And so I think that's a smart move when you're talking about money, especially your personal finances, even in general terms.

Right? And so as a user, it's your responsibility to stay informed, to understand what the tools you're using are doing, and so I encourage you to take that step. You know? I used to be the person who would, like, get the update on my phone, and I would just be like, yep, update it, it's fine, go ahead.

And now I'm the person who actually sits and reads, well, what are the changes? Why are these changes being made? Is it to support me? Is it to use my data differently?

And so I would encourage everyone to make similar steps in their life.

I think with this ever-evolving landscape of AI, it's really important for all of us to be hyperaware of what we're saying, doing, and who we're interacting with as well, you know, not giving that personal identifying information out.

It's so important. Yes. Now, when we talk about AI, if we want something specific to our situation, how do we need to communicate that? Like, when we think about context of what we're saying and what we're asking, what type of language can we use to really make it personalized to my individual experience without giving away that personal identifying information?

You know, because it's that fine line— Yes, it is. —between the two of those things.

Yeah, so I have a prompt template that I like to talk about, and it's one that helps me to share the information, to brainstorm with the tool the way that I want to, but it keeps my professional or my personal information, you know, secure. And so, you know, I have a prompt template that sounds a little bit like this. So it's a simple starter that I like to teach people.

You know, you can talk about your age in general or your role in general. Right? Your monthly income as an estimated exact amount. If you're working on a budget, your bills, you can say, you can use really general terms like “power” or “grocery,” more so than “my Publix run” or my, you know, whatever store that I might go to or where I might be actually spending my money.

And then provide your, you know, your need or your concern that you're using the tool to brainstorm with you for. So here's an example that I think can be helpful. So if I'm prompting ChatGPT, I might say something like this: “I'm twenty-eight, I make roughly around four thousand dollars a month, and my rent is roughly twelve hundred dollars a month.

I pay a general car payment at around three hundred dollars a month, and I want to save ten thousand dollars within the next year and a half.

So, I also have other expenses that I have tallied up monthly to be about two hundred dollars.” Right?

So, I'm not giving all the detail of everything that I'm paying.

Important.

“So, help me plan and explain what I might discuss with my financial advisor.” So, I've provided all general information. I haven't provided, even though it is information specific to some, potentially me, right? And so your question was about, you know, how do I talk about me without giving it all away? Right. In general, Cherry. Yes. Keep it general.

Yes, okay.

Love that. Thank you for that very specific example. I think that is so helpful.

So how do you see AI evolving in this area, specifically of personal finance, in the next months, even years?

I know it's like every day, you wake up and, something new has happened, or I think, you know, we're going to move from these AI tools being more like this smart search box that we're all kind of familiar with and getting used to now to this technology or functionality being built right into our financial tools or our banking tools. So, you know, it can help you spot unusual spending, forecast cash flow, or suggest better savings moves in real time. And I believe that there are some functionalities like that that already exist within a lot of our banking options now. But imagine your banking app in the future saying, “Hey, if you keep on spending like this, you'll miss your goal to pay off that car early.”

Right? So I foresee a future where we are feeding in what our goals are. We're being very specific, and we're using AI through our banking systems almost like an accountability partner, As that reminder to say, “Hey, you told me you wanted to achieve a certain goal, and based on the activity that I'm seeing here, you're not headed in that direction.” Right.

Right? How cool would that be to have that reminder? To get those nudges, those reminders.

Yeah. To have accountability. And I do believe that having accountability is so key in achieving your goals and breaking bad behaviors that we might have.

Very true. Very true. Yeah. Yes. I also see a future where we'll see better personalization.

Right? So, AI that really understands these different income patterns, family structures, cultural values. Especially when it comes to our money conversations. And, you know, we'll still need humans for the complex planning and for the emotional side of money decisions, but, you know, I see a world where this technology helps to continue to advance us in ways that it's already done in a lot of ways.

Yeah. Thank you so much. You really made, you know, the idea of AI and personal finance relatable and understandable and gave us those specific tools that we need to, you know, guide us through that journey.

We just appreciate your time and your expertise, Ida.

Thank you. Absolutely. Happy to be here anytime.

Pay That Bill is a podcast designed to entertain and, more importantly, educate. The show is produced by Virginia Credit Union and is developed alongside our award-winning Financial Education team. We have a library full of free resources available online that can help you on your journey to financial success. If you want to learn more about what we talked about today, check out the links we have in the description of this episode.

The information provided in Pay That Bill is for educational and informational purposes only and should not be considered financial advice. While we aim to share helpful insights and general strategies, every listener's financial situation is unique. Consult with a qualified professional for any investment or financial advice. The hosts and guests of this podcast are not responsible for any outcomes resulting from actions taken based on the content discussed.