Gen Z trust in AI-only financial advice fell from 20% to 10%, a new investor survey says

On October 19, 2026, SIFMA and KPMG released the 2026 VISTA study, titled "Expanding Choices, Enduring Investor Priorities." It surveyed more than 2,100 U.S. individual investors. Most of it is about trust and advisors, but one line is squarely about AI: trust in AI-only financial advice declined across generations.

The AI numbers in the release

The sharpest drop is among Gen Z, where trust in AI-only advice fell from 20% in 2025 to 10% in 2026.³ The release says the decline ran across generations, but it prints the Gen Z figures only.

Two other findings frame it. Investors who combine human advice with their own self-directed access report 87% satisfaction, one point below the 88% of fully advisor-supported investors.⁴ And 43% say they are unlikely to switch providers because of enhanced digital and AI capabilities, up from 35% last year.⁵

The release also reports that trust in financial advisors as a primary source of investment advice rose to 52%, and that Gen Z's reliance on advisors as the primary source went from 39% in 2025 to 42% in 2026.⁶

Who ran it, and why that matters

KPMG describes the work as an independent study, and SIFMA sponsored it. SIFMA is the trade association for broker-dealers, investment banks and asset managers. Its members sell advice and brokerage. That does not make the numbers wrong, but a survey that finds advisors trusted and human guidance valued is also a survey that supports the sponsor's business model. Read the AI-only line with that in mind.

The release gives no margin of error, no wording for the trust question, and no subgroup sample sizes. Subgroup results are noisier than whole-sample ones, so the exact size of the drop is uncertain, even if a halving is hard to dismiss.⁷

Trust is not usage

The finding is about trust in AI-only advice, not about how many people use AI tools. Other recent work points the other way on usage. The FCA said in a speech on October 19 that four in five less-experienced UK investors aged 18 to 40 have used AI to help with investing.⁸ Different country, different question, different sponsor. Still, the two readings fit together: people try AI tools and are cautious about letting them stand alone.

That is a useful distinction for anyone building or testing AI finance tools. A product can be widely tried and still not trusted as the final word. The VISTA language, advisors plus technology, describes a tool that assists a decision, not one that makes it.

What it shows, what it doesn't

The release gives us direction. In this survey, the share of Gen Z investors who trust AI-only advice fell while reliance on human advisors rose. Hybrid investors were nearly as satisfied as those who rely fully on advisors. We have not seen the full report's tables, so we cannot say how the AI-only question was asked, whether the same people were interviewed both years, or how large each group was.

How we would test the claim

If you want to check the idea rather than trust a headline, run a small experiment of your own. Ask the same assistant the same allocation question five times, then ask a human-written source the same question. Compare how much the answers move. Our earlier coverage of audits of AI advice, such as the Same Person, Different Advice study, found that advice can change when only the client's stated risk answer changes. A tool that varies is harder to trust alone, and that may be part of what survey respondents are reacting to, though the survey itself does not say so.

Nothing here says whether AI advice is good or bad, and nothing here is advice about your money. It says that, in one large U.S. survey sponsored by the industry, fewer young investors say they would trust AI by itself, and more of them say they want a person in the loop.