Financial literacy becomes boring when it comes to understanding the concepts and remembering this through conceptual knowledge. Most high schoolers lose the interest to focus on financial literacy, if they are confined to just text books or knowledge extracts. As AI takes center stage in our lives , it is significantly changing our perspective of how we work , educate ourselves and take care of our personal priorities in life. From being productive at work and school to applying knowledge for practical purposes , things are becoming more feasible and achievable. 54% of high schoolers are using AI chatbots today for their school work and the % is even higher for Latino and African American kids (65-70%).
Ai is changing the way we learn and helping kids to experiment with a problem , create a hypothesis , model it and then validate it. There has been a significant increase in the number of AI applications that have the potential to teach high schoolers to use financial tools to simulate investment decisions and make better decisions. What used to be buried as data in excel sheets can be modeled into engineering problems and outcomes. AI tools can help with complex concepts like compound interest , APR using simple reliable analogies.
- StockTrack – This helps high schoolers with stock market simulation , making intelligent decisions on portfolio rebalancing and risk simulations. High schoolers with a virtual wallet can run a portfolio of assets that can teach real world experience of making money in the stock market. By the time they graduate and start earning money , they can become strong with stock market fundamentals , analyzing market data , predicting events influencing stock markets and be prudent to play different strategies for building wealth.
- Intertwined (with Fin AI) – This gives a financial assistant for students to plan their budgeting , help them take prudent decisions and help them simulate spends. An AI tool that can learn and guide the students to take right decisions on budgeting and also inculcate some good practices around savings and budget rationalization.
- CreditVerse – An immersive curriculum powered by VR and AI that gives students live financial lessons through AI driven scenarios. The retention of knowledge through such simulation based tools has proven to jump to 60% against 10% with conventional ways of learning.
- Zogo – A reward based model platform that incentivizes students for taking the right financial decision and creating a financial journey.
These platforms and some of others as well provide multilingual and country specific financial rules to help students globally cater to their region specific learnings. Kuber.AI , a personal finance tool supports 20+ Indian languages. Think about a country like India , where the population is so dispersed with regional languages. These tools are helping transcend the barrier of learning and making financial education viable to masses through local language and financial rule settings. Walnut – An AI driven expense tracker automatically reads SMS alerts to monitor UPI and card spends.
While AI may accelerate and make learning simulation driven with scenarios easier , it also comes with its pitfalls . What if AI
- Confidently state incorrect financial data such as wrong interest rates , outdated tax brackets to help students build a long term savings plan based on mathematical error.
- AI can reward high risk taker behaviors in simulation , which can potentially create a wrong behavior of risk , which can be devastating with real money.
- AI sometimes can over simplify tax laws , not giving enough details of fine prints of those laws for a specific region . Such mis-information can lead to shallow education for kids , which can impact their future financial decisions.
- AI can also lead to legal blindness for some regional nuances resulting in bad decisions.
High schoolers have to learn and adopt newer and smarter techniques to avoid these pitfalls. They should adopt a verification first mindset , challenging some of the recommendations and ideas being given by AI . Visiting authentic web sites of local government bodies , trying to understand the implication of local laws and nuances through structured research is always helpful. While AI tools can be helpful , it should be treated as a starting point for investment choices and decisions. Students should also learn chain prompting techniques to reason out AI thinking so that they get a better validated content that they can depend upon to learn and unlearn.
