From Information to Delegation: Mapping Human-AI Financial Decision Making
2026-08-03 • Human-Computer Interaction
Human-Computer InteractionMachine Learning
AI summaryⓘ
The authors studied how people share decision-making between themselves and AI tools, especially in financial services. By analyzing 1.5 million real interactions with ChatGPT and Gemini users in the US and India, they found that people mostly use AI to get information and help form financial opinions. However, people rarely let AI make actual financial decisions for them. The authors created a way to measure how much control users give to AI, which helps understand how AI’s role in decision-making might grow over time.
AI decision-makingdelegated authorityfinancial servicesChatGPTGeminibehavioral measurementhuman-AI interactionagentic AIconsumer behavior
Authors
Iman Munire Bilal, Yingcan Carol Wang, Ajan Raj, Filippo Giovagnini, Pranav Tewari, Yuwei Zhang, Mei-Chen Zoe Liou, Qamar Zaman
Abstract
As AI increasingly participates in human decision making, understanding how decision-making authority is distributed between humans and AI has become a fundamental behavioural question. We introduce a behavioural measurement framework combining intent and delegated decision authority to quantify what consumers seek from AI and how much decision-making authority they assign to it. Applied to 1.5 million real-world ChatGPT and Gemini interactions from 6,304 users in the United States and India, we find that financial services are already a substantial AI use case. Consumers overwhelmingly use AI to retrieve information and shape financial judgement, while delegation of financial execution remains rare. By shifting attention from conversation topics to delegated decision authority, this work establishes a behavioural baseline for measuring the transition to increasingly agentic AI.