MACHINE intelligence has changed the way a great many industries work, but few as quickly as investing. Investors around the world now lean on AI to sharpen their decisions, and Filipinos are further along that path than most.
Bridgewise’s latest study, “The State of AI for Wealth in 2026,” surveyed 2,100 respondents across 19 countries in North America, Europe, APAC, Latin America and the Middle East on how they use AI for investment information. The Philippines came out among the leading countries on both trust and adoption.
Sixty-two percent of Filipinos often use AI to answer an investment question or to pull scattered investment information together, against 45 percent globally, and 88 percent said they trust the accuracy of the data these tools produce, well above the global average of 76 percent.
Only 12 percent doubt responses from AI tools when it comes to investment information, against the 24 percent recorded in the rest of the world, and confidence is still building. Sixty-five percent of Filipino respondents trust AI for investments more than they did a year ago, compared with 52 percent elsewhere.
What makes these figures worth pausing on is that the trust holds even when the tools get it wrong. Fifty-eight percent of Philippine-based respondents said they had received incorrect data from an AI tool, well above the 44 percent reported by foreign respondents, and their confidence in the technology did not fall as a result.
This is the shift that is rewriting the playbook local investment experts, wealth management consultants and everyday retail investors have worked from for years, and the respondents can feel it: 83 percent of those based in the Philippines believe AI gives them an edge over investors who do not use it.
Asked what they get from it, they point to data they could not reach before, including trends drawn from news and social media, opportunities they would otherwise have missed, hours saved and a clearer read on market conditions and risk.
Access to that kind of research was the first shift. The larger change is in what has grown up around it. With expert AI built specifically for investments, retail trading platforms can now begin to support investors at every level in a proactive way: flagging the moves that matter to one particular investor, explaining why they matter and answering the follow-up question in that investor’s own language. They can propose a portfolio action and then simply prompt the investor or their adviser to approve it. This takes investors from a static platform where the burden of research and decision-making is entirely on them to a guided investment experience.
Access to the market has become a commodity, and access to AI-generated research is heading the same way, so what will set investment AI apart is threefold: expertise — the depth and breadth of financial data and historical context feeding it; clarity and compliance — whether an investor can see and understand how a recommendation is reached; and experience — the proactive guidance that gives everyday investors the confidence to act. Filipino investors have already extended this technology their trust, and now it’s time for institutions to follow suit.
Dor Eligula is the chief business officer & co-founder of Bridgewise, an AI-powered financial technology company that provides automated investment research, analysis, and insights for global securities.