Try it now!
Managing your investments has never been easier!
Should you trust artificial intelligence with your money? Andrew Izyumov, the founder of 8FIGURES, took up that question with host Howie Lim on BT Money Hacks, The Business Times’ personal-finance podcast. The provocation in the title — “artificial sycophant or financial genius?” — captures the tension: an AI that simply agrees with you can be worse than no adviser at all. Over roughly sixteen minutes, the two worked through where AI genuinely helps an investor and where it quietly introduces new risks.
A model tuned to be agreeable will tend to tell you what you want to hear — and in investing, a confident yes-man is a liability. Andrew’s point was that useful financial software has to be willing to disagree with you: to flag concentration, question a thesis, or push back on a decision driven by fear or excitement, rather than flatter it. An adviser whose only job is to keep you happy, human or algorithmic, is not really advising. In markets, the comfortable answer and the correct one are often not the same.
Trust, in the conversation, came down to incentives and transparency: what is the tool actually optimizing for, and can you see how it reached a conclusion? Andrew argued that investors should understand the incentives behind any advice — human or machine — and treat an AI’s output as something to verify, not to obey. The same scrutiny you would bring to a salesperson’s recommendation, he suggested, belongs on an algorithm’s. Knowing what a system is built to do is the first step to trusting any part of it — which is why 8FIGURES sets out how its own AI-assisted guidance works, and where it stops, in its AI Advice Disclosure.
This is where a multi-agent design earns its keep. In 8FIGURES, a risk officer that pushes back on the analyst surfaces genuine tension instead of manufacturing false confidence — closer to how a real investment committee argues toward a decision. Disagreement, handled openly, is a feature. You can see how that engine is structured on our AI Investment Advisor page. A single model asked to be both optimistic and cautious tends to blur the two; separate agents keep the trade-offs visible.
Much of poor investing is behavioral — selling in a panic, chasing a rally. Andrew and Lim explored whether AI can add discipline and context in those moments, helping an investor pause and see the whole picture. The caveat is honest: a tool that is blindly trusted becomes its own risk, so the aim is calmer decisions, not outsourced ones. Used well, Andrew argued, the technology is a check on impulse rather than a substitute for a plan. The goal is to take some of the emotion out of the moment without taking the investor out of the loop.
Faster is not automatically better. The pair questioned the assumption that reacting first is what wins, with Andrew making the case that durable results come from process and patience rather than reflexes — and that the right role for AI is to support that discipline, not to accelerate impulsive trading. For most people building wealth, the edge is behavioral, not reaction time.
The full conversation is on BT Money Hacks, hosted by Howie Lim for The Business Times. Listen on Apple Podcasts or at The Business Times.
This article is general information, not personalized financial, investment, tax, or legal advice. Investing involves risk, including possible loss of principal. AI-assisted tools support — they do not replace — your own judgment and professional guidance.
Managing your investments has never been easier!
