Spending trackers
We all make hundreds of purchases, modest or large, every year. Each of them is stored in your banking app, if you use one – as three out of five Brits reportedly do – but still, wouldn’t it be nice to know exactly where your money was going without laboriously totting all your transactions up on a calculator? This is where generative AI, which loves nothing more than mining large amounts of data, comes in. Use an app such as ExpensesAI or PocketGuard to track your outlays, analyse your spending habits and let you know if you’re spending too much.
Subscription managers
Netflix, Now TV, Disney+, Apple TV, Hulu… do you know how many services you’re subscribed to? And that’s just TV: let’s not forget internet access, music apps, paid podcasts, gym memberships and whatever else you’ve committed to paying for each month because it seemed like a good idea at the time. A subs manager such as Little Birdie (UK) or Rocket Money (USA) will help you manage, retain and cancel recurring payments with ease. Ask yourself: how many of these paid-for services do I really need – and is a cheaper or free alternative available?
Savings tools
Saving is tricky, no matter what your income level is, as your lifestyle tends to become more expensive the more you earn. Even if you do save, knowing how much to put away, and where to put it, isn’t easy. Apps such as Plum use their AI brains to examine your income and outlays to figure out how much spare cash you can afford to save and/or invest, takes those amounts – even if they’re small – and gets you the best return on those sums. The principle of ‘little and often’ applies here, with regular investments of even minor amounts adding up surprisingly quickly – and perhaps without you even noticing.
Negotiation assistants
AI tools such as Nibble and NegotiateAI are just two examples of how the supposedly human art of negotiation – in multiple scenarios from signing contracts to paying bills – is actually a perfect field for machine learning. After all, where does a negotiated figure go? Only up or down. How does it move up or down? Through a sequence of offers and counter-offers. So far, so binary – but where the AI element of the tech comes in is that it can parse a long list of contributory factors that control where the numbers go, sorting them for the best, most suitable and/or most ‘human’ solution.
Credit score analysis
Your credit score is a bit like a delicate plant growing in your garden: you need to look after it, make sure it doesn’t get damaged, and heal it when it does. As so many factors affect your credit score, from how much you’ve borrowed to how much lenders want you to borrow, AI is useful for analysing and delivering the best strategy for keeping your score healthy. There are tons of available tools – Dovly, Render and CreditBoost AI among them – so take your time and ask yourself what you need from your credit score before you sign up.
Bill splitting
It’s your work colleague’s birthday dinner – and everyone around you has drunk and eaten their own weight in wine and sushi, while you’ve only had a glass of water and some olives because you’re not hungry and you want to get an early night. Dreading the bill? Of course you are, especially when some intoxicated dimwit mumbles “Shall we split everything equally?” at you. However, help is at hand with tools such as Deepgram’s Split My Expenses: these apps figure out what everyone owes in a non-embarrassing way. (Mind you, even AI can’t convince someone that they’ve had six beers when they’re certain they’ve only had four.)
Receipt scanning
No need to try and decipher the tiny print on your receipts, whining about how you can’t find your reading glasses. Simply use your phone to scan a receipt, and the AI in an app like SparkReceipt will instantly decode, analyse and store the text and figures. In due course, when you come to do a bit of personal accounting, the numbers and payees will be right there in front of you. These apps are particularly useful if your job gives you an expense allowance, if you’re worried that you might have paid £100 by mistake for a £10 item, or if you’re just tired of piles of receipts cluttering up the kitchen.
Anti-fraud tools
Today’s world is infested with dodgy people trying to rip you off, to the point where we’re reluctant to click on any internet link or even answer the phone to an unlisted number. Still, we have friendly AIs to hand. Huntress, Genie, Resistant AI, Hawk: all these chummy-yet-macho-sounding apps are there to protect you from scams designed to relieve you of your money. One of the jobs they do is scan all your incoming communications for security, with the AI component used to exploit fraud patterns; another is to ‘click ahead’, as it were, checking where links go before you click on them.
Beginner-friendly investment tools
Looking to move into stocks and shares? You’re not alone, with millions of people choosing to dabble with investments once a certain level of household income is present. You could go it alone, and indeed that’s the most fun way to do it – but it’s also the riskiest, so if your appetite for risk is low, enlist an AI to help. Wealthfront, Betterment and Robinhood are just three apps that will search the market for likely-looking investment opportunities on your behalf, but as with any financial activity, be clear how much you’re prepared to lose when (not if) a given scenario goes wrong.
Tax tools
Apps such as TaxGPT (see what they did there?) will help the average person figure out how much tax they owe and when it needs to be paid, ‘average person’ in this case meaning anyone who a) doesn’t have all their tax deducted at source and b) would rather not have to spend time learning/worrying about it. The reason we need an AI to manage our taxes for us is because – assuming you don’t live in a tax haven – most countries’ taxation systems are hopelessly complex above a certain income point. Rules also change every year, as do tax-deductable allowances, so the only downside here is that your accountant will be peeved with you if you replace them with an app.
Sending money
Ever tried to transfer a significant amount of money overseas, for example as a wedding gift for your cousin who lives in Sydney? It was a massive pain until the arrival of PayPal, and even then it cost an annoying amount of money. Fortunately, AI has arrived in the form of apps like Remitly and Transfergo, helping to reduce the risk of fraud, offering you a user-friendly experience and giving you support when needed. Given the various financial obstacles that exist in 2025 between the UK and Europe, and between the US and everywhere else, the presence of AI in this area could prove very useful.
AI banking
We all know that the days of the bricks-and-mortar bank branch are numbered, and while you may find that regrettable depending on your circumstances and demographic, there’s no denying that a digital account does everything that a branch-located account does, and more. Banking apps have been around for ages, but the recent arrival of AI in this field means that apps such as Chip and MetroBank can do more, work faster, spot fraud, analyse cashflow patterns and recommend better solutions. Of course, they’ll take a cut for their efforts, so read the small print. Perhaps things haven’t changed that much after all…
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