Before we started building Lucie Money we ran a survey last year asking 358 young Australians, aged 18 to 35, about their money. I wrote about the money findings a while back but there was a second set of findings I never wrote up: what they told us about AI.
I’ve recently gone back through the raw responses, every one of them, and they turned out to be more nuanced than I’d remembered… certainly more nuanced than some of the public argument about AI tends to be.
The guts of the survey was a 4-minute concept video of Lucie explaining how it would work and the sorts of things it would do. Then we asked a straight question: “Lucie’s an AI agent, powered by AI to help you stay on top of your money. How do you feel about that?”
- 22% loved the idea
- 40% were keen “as long as I’m still in control”
- 24% wanted to know more before they’d trust it
- 11% weren’t sold on AI being involved with money stuff
- 2% said they weren’t into it, they’d rather manage things themselves
- 1% weren’t sure
So only 13% were averse to the idea, with about a quarter open to it and nearly two thirds keen.
But the response I keep coming back to is the 40%. The single biggest group picked the option with the “condition” attached. They were keen… as long as. And when you read the written comments, that perspective turns out to be really informative.
What “as long as” actually means
We gave people space to raise questions and hesitations in their own words, and well over a hundred did. Reading them all together, the same three questions kept coming up.
Is my data safe? This was far and away the most common concern.
“Is my data going to get stolen?”
“Will it sell my info?”
“Mainly just worried about linking bank apps to Lucie with all the recent data breaches that has been happening.”
Will it be right?
“Sometimes AI can make mistakes for things like simple math and I’m wondering if that is going to happen here.”
“Risk of the AI hallucinating incorrect information, returning incorrect sums, or giving unfounded advice.”
“How would I know when a mistake is made?”
Can it do things without me?
“How would I make sure it didn’t access my funds without authorisation?”
“My only hesitation would be making actual payments with the AI.”
What strikes me about these three questions is how reasonable they are. There’s no philosophy in them. I’d ask the same questions.
What they’re not saying
Well, they’re not saying no.
Complete rejection barely came up: only 2% of the sample; though of course people inclined to totally hate the idea probably wouldn’t take a survey called “Help shape Lucie” in the first place. In this small group a handful were blunt about it (“I just hate AI”), and I take that view very seriously; it’s a real concern, and I suspect it’s growing. But the overwhelming majority sat somewhere between ‘curious’ and ‘enthusiastic’, provided their conditions were met.
And one response, for me, said the whole thing:
“If this works, it would feel like a load off. I want the element of control but I like how the AI sees the big picture of all my expenses and income and can kind of take care of it for me.”
In other words do something that actually matters to me, on my terms, and I’m in.
What that means for what we’re building
Those three questions have become more or less our requirements list:
- data security treated as seriously as a bank would treat it, because linking your accounts to anything is an act of trust
- figures designed to come through verified paths from your bank rather than generated by the AI, so the number on the screen is the number
- nothing done without your say-so: at launch Lucie won’t move money at all, and anything in that direction later will happen on your explicit terms or not at all.
But this is also kind-of why I’m doing all this. There’s plenty of reasons to be worried about AI, and believe me, I share those worries with many people. But the reason I’m building Lucie is a belief that this technology can also do something genuinely good for people: something small, personal and on your side.
And in our survey, the great majority of respondents told us they’re open to exactly that, when done properly. Which gives me hope that we’re onto something.
If you’d like to be kept informed about how we’re going, there’s a waitlist at lucie.money.