Gillian Tett

However, ordinary consumers have, for the most part, not been dealing with an AI robot as their financial advisor.

Or robo-advisors, you mean?

Robo-advisors, yes.

I suspect that's coming.

Secondly, though, you're going to see growing customization and sense of agency or control by individuals.

Because historically, there's been a sense where trust tended to be expressed in a vertical form, and you as an individual would trust your financial advisor or your banker or someone in charge to tell you what to do.

Increasingly, we're seeing individuals saying, actually,

I want to trust myself or my peer group.

It's what they call lateral trust, peer-to-peer trust.

And with the rise of people using their mobile phones for payments and for investing and saving, I think you're going to see increasingly people saying, I want to do it myself rather than rely on somebody else, but I may well end up doing it with a robo-advisor instead of your good old friendly human bank manager.

I think we're likely to see more and more risk put on to individuals, which is not good.

I hope that governments step in and provide some kind of shelter or safety net or at least a basic form of saving account that people can trust.

But that's going to be one of the big questions going forward.

Firstly, who is going to create the kind of AI literacy we need?

Is it going to be government doing the training or companies or will it be universities or philanthropy or individuals?

And who is actually going to provide the financial literacy we're all going to need in the future?

That's where you see the new area that people really need to upskill on.

Absolutely.

It's going to be a combination of things.

And ordinary people don't need to understand the inner workings of AI or the inner workings of financial markets.