26m of us don’t know what’s going on with their retirement savings. Does anyone blame them?

I love these pictures of focussed and delighted wrinklies  finding that pension reports offer  reassurance. I press the link that find I am being guided to “insights”

Part Three explores technology and AI are set to play an increasingly important role in helping people engage with their pensions and make retirement decisions. The latest findings from the 2026 Scottish Widows Retirement Report explore how innovations such as pension dashboards, open finance, gamified learning and AI-powered support could make retirement planning more accessible and intuitive.

While awareness of AI is widespread, trust remains a significant barrier, particularly for higher-stakes financial decisions. The research highlights both the opportunities and challenges ahead, showing how technology could help close the advice gap, improve engagement and widen access to support, provided it is implemented with appropriate safeguards, transparency and consumer protections.

There follows a direction to a press release which suggests that this report has answers which puts Scottish Widows and other pension providers at the heart of informed decisions.

Regulated financial advisers are trusted but presumably from those who have access to them.

The question I have from these findings is perhaps too obvious; what is going on with the 70% who aren’t saying they’d trust AI to help them and the 70% who aren’t wanting to involve a regulated adviser. There are over two thirds of those retiring who aren’t engaged with this conversation.

• Almost one in three (30%) people trust AI tools to help with their pension

• Eight out of 10 of them (80%) trust AI from regulated financial experts

• Almost a third (31%) would take AI-based information on big financial decisions to a financial adviser and one in four (24%) would speak to their pension provider.

With over 26 million UK adults^* lacking confidence when managing their savings for retirement, more are now turning to AI to better understand their pension savings.

I think it natural that as AI becomes easier to use (and free) , it will become the first port of call for boats that have been out at sea.

There is a supposition in this work that people will need to be advised or helped in taking decisions that they find too hard – especially around drawing their income when they want to turn into pension. There is a hope that AI will come to the rescue, but AI tools that are controlled by regulators and the regulated.

Growing trust in regulated AI tools

Trust is a huge factor when using AI for money decisions. Crucially, FCA-regulated AI tools come with formal consumer protections, which provide a safety net if things don’t go as planned. Unregulated or general-purpose AI tools don’t offer this protection – if they give inaccurate or unsuitable advice that leads to financial loss, people may be left without any support.

The idea that decisions don’t need to be taken and that (as happens in public sector pensions) decisions can be restricted to when to take cash and pension, is not in question. Most decisions taken with pensions offered by occupational pension schemes do not need advice (AI or human).

For Scottish Widows who offer pots not pensions,  AI is currently no more than a starting point, the door which takes you to a discussion with a human being. But it is highly likely that a lot of money is being drawn from Scottish Widows pots with instruction from AI and who knows if that advice is regulated or not?

So Scottish Widows find that people look for ways to keep these decisions regulated using humans. I would worry that the 70% who aren’t expressing an interest aren’t worried about regulation, they just want their money back!

Here’s what Scottish Widows’ press release on its latest AI support tells us.

The human touch still matters for big decisions

The findings also reveal that while AI is a useful tool for demystifying financial products and helping people make decisions about their retirement options, there’s still a strong desire to speak to a financial professional for more complex decisions when the stakes are higher.

For example, just one in 10 (10%) retirees would be comfortable with AI suggesting the best way to withdraw from their pension. Among those aged 50 and over, just 5% plan to rely on AI tools before taking money from their pot.

Almost half (48%) of people are worried that AI may give wrong or unsuitable pension advice, 43% worry about the safety of their data and two in five (38%) don’t think it would take their personal circumstances into account.

But AI has a valuable role to play in helping people take their first step towards financial advice, with nearly a third (31%) saying they would take AI-generated insights to a professional financial adviser and a quarter (24%) using AI information to have more informed conversations with their pension provider.

There is a lot that follows about the capacity for providers like Scottish Widows to use technology to help human interactions but there’s no question as to whether the products used to pay pensions can be simplified to make the process easy enough to take decisions online.

Nor is there a question about whether the FCA can regulate the unregulated advice which is everywhere you go when you search for help on pensions.

My view is that support for people at retirement is so inadequate that it is leading to millions of people cashing out their pots or sitting on their money waiting for instruction. It may be that we get that instruction if guided retirement becomes a default that tells people what is happening to their money. Retirement CDC in this respect is another option that may be “chosen” or the “default” depending on what comes out of the current consultation.

But with 26m of us  “lacking confidence” with our retirement savings can AI support us?

We either need a scaling up of human resource, a regulation of AI or we need simpler retirement decisions to take.