The Critical Lens Everyone Needs: Ai, Fake Data, And Your Retirement Money

In this episode Chris Tobe, CFA, CAIA breaks down how AI-driven misinformation and “fake signals” can end up creating real fiduciary risk in retirement planning.

Chris explains what makes retirement information vulnerable in the age of AI—how false or misleading inputs can distort the way people (and systems) interpret plan details—and why that matters for compliance and decision-making. He also shares practical guidance on how consumers can use AI tools more wisely: verifying claims, stress-testing recommendations, and looking for trustworthy signals before acting on retirement-related information.

Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network

We’re gonna welcome back to the program, Chris Tobe. Chris, it’s great to see you.

Thanks for joining us in the program this morning.

Chris Tobe, CFA, CAIA, Hackett Group

Oh, glad to be here.

Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network

I always enjoy our conversations, Chris, and like you, I have served in a fiduciary capacity. Before we get started and talk about, I guess, information or disinformation or misinformation in financial services, I want people to understand your background, your role. So tell us about what you do for the Hackett Group and maybe what you do extracurricularly.

Chris Tobe, CFA, CAIA, Hackett Group

Yeah, well, it’s Hackett, Roberts and Tobe is their official name, but Hackett, Tony Hackett, it’s a minority-owned SEC registered investment advisor out of New Orleans. And we do a lot of project consulting, a lot for public pensions work, which is a lot of what I’ve done in the past. And so it plays on that, but we have also done some 401k projects and other things like that as well.

But again, in this age, I’m kind of a gig worker and I’m doing work for there. Then I do a lot of work in my own name as a consultant in fiduciary litigation, primarily 401k litigation. And of course, I have a background as a trustee for the Kentucky Pension Plan and work for NEPC and FEG, some more mainstream consultants and done that full thing as well.

So I’ve been around a long time and done a lot of things. And again, I enjoy all the different avenues that I do currently.

Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network

Yeah, and the reason why I like talking to you because you are a wealth of knowledge and you bring that perspective to the show. So Chris, I know we chatted offline. There was a recent article released, I guess a report research done by Bloomberg related to the Department of Labor new investment selection rules is what I’m gonna call them.

Some interesting findings from this article. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about it?

Chris Tobe, CFA, CAIA, Hackett Group

Well, again, they found that literally hundreds of these will seem to be planted by outside. It could be bots or somebody who are, and a lot of the people, when they looked them up, they found out they were actually dead. So we not only have dead people voting in elections, we have dead people making comments with the Department of Labor saying how great private equity is because there just aren’t that many individuals who are out there clamoring for private equity in their 401k.

So they kind of just invented them. And so I think it’s worse than Google reviews that we talked about in a way because this is the integrity of a government agency to deal well and allowing this to happen in the process just does not give a good vibe out there as a fiduciary. But the one thing I wanted to talk about was that how this occurred is that how AI is changing the entire world of research and looking at things.

And these particular Bloomberg reporters, what we call data reporters. So they kind of, their specific thing is to look for big pools of data and find things in there. And with AI, you can do that very quickly and efficiently.

So this is one of the first, what I would call data articles that have been, and a lot of the other big news outlets are hiring data reporters as well. And I think it’s just gonna change everything AI. I mean, an individual participant could put their statement and ask AI, am I paying too much in fees?

There’s just something wrong there. And it would spit something out. And that’s something that’s never, we’ve never been in that world before.

An advisor can do the same thing. He ought to look at, he could, any time a plan he’s working on or whatever, he should have AI take a look at it and see what a participant would get if they did that. So he would be prepared for questions coming up or he’d have a little bit of a head start there on what the potential issues are gonna be in this plan over the next couple of years.

Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network

So I think you bring up an interesting point. So I just wanna go back to the article. And I haven’t looked at the sources.

I’m assuming they did a lot of due diligence, although I don’t wanna make assumptions. I just assume, candidly, Chris, I just assume, and you mentioned Google, we were talking about this offline, Google reviews and Amazon reviews. There’s a lot of fake stuff out there.

There’s a lot of misinformation as it relates to buying particular products. We just went through the GameStop issue a couple years ago, meme coins, right? A lot of buying based on what other people are saying, or maybe computers are saying.

I think to your point, whether it’s AI driven or not, that’s a big issue. You gotta put on the critical reasoning hat in order to know whether something makes sense or not.

Chris Tobe, CFA, CAIA, Hackett Group

Well, and the kidding is, even if they get caught, they’re gonna get better. Because I think the AI, the data guys, if we were picked up, that all the comments all sound the same. Sure.

And again, I mean, that’s been something people did when they’re writing to Congress. There’ll be a big effort and everybody will give them a form letter. And it’s more similar to that than even the Google reviews would be kind of the things, write your congressman that you’re against data centers and there’s a form letter and everybody picks up the same form letter.

So that’s been being done for decades. And so this is similar to that, but then AI could go into sophisticated enough that goes, I wanna do a random generator. I wanna generate these comments, they’ll all be different.

They can do it in 10 seconds and still give you 60 comments that look different. But they actually, that’s what tipped them off. But then they started following the names and when they called the names and followed up, they said, these people were clueless about a comment letter and a few were dead.

The ones that were alive had no idea it was gone. So they did a testing of four or five of them and they at least, and they found that pattern. So it’s just, in a way, this is AI, people cannot get away with stuff like they could used to because a very simple, I mean, just a regular retiree could figure out what’s going on with AI where an investigative report used to take six months to do.

The same thing could be done in six minutes by an individual though.

Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network

I would argue it could be done in six seconds, but I think your point is well taken. It seems to me that, and I don’t know the answer other than the consumer, you, me, other people have to have that critical lens when we’re looking at information. Gotta be a little bit of a doubting Thomas in some ways and I don’t wanna be a pessimist because I think that that’s not good either, but I think you wanna be maybe balanced in what you’re reading.

And I think that’s gonna be important, but how do you put guardrails in? Like, I’m thinking about FINRA, some of the SEC, some of the regulatory bodies, where does this responsibility lie to put these guardrails in to prevent disinformation or misinformation?

Chris Tobe, CFA, CAIA, Hackett Group

Again, I think that the regulators are just, I mean, most of them are understaffed, they’re so far behind, they’re always gonna be behind what you can do out there on your own or what’s gonna be done in litigation. So I think litigation will continue to lead and regulators will be kind of, just kind of picking up the pieces behind and working with it. On guardrails, again, I think we talked about this before, my biggest concern for 1K World is that the guardrails, SEC mutual funds were great guardrails, and now we have these collective CITs and they’re not as good a guardrail, but I did some more research since we talked last, and I found some of the states are very good guardrails, like Pennsylvania has a pretty good guardrail around their CITs, whereas Nevada does not, it has this hardly any guardrail.

So there’s even, I didn’t wanna insulate between the federally regulated OCC CITs and the states, every state is different. So what the problem is, it allows the Wall Street and insurance companies to choose the weakest state of 50 state regulators. And insurance companies have done that forever, 50, I worked at Transamerica, we went to Iowa, it was the easiest state to regulate.

So there’s a state regulation shopping that we’ve seen going on. And I just saw another article in the Lever this morning about Elon Musk did regulation shopping for his own intrabank. And he’s gotten every state to sign on, he finally is getting New York now, his last state to sign on to his banking app.

I don’t know exactly what it’s gonna be, but it’s all tied to X and all the apps on the phone. So I think that’s the kind of thing that’s going on and that regulators, they’re just bypassing FINRA and the regulators that are going to state regulators seems to be the thing going for looser guardrails or no guardrails at all when they can. That’s the pattern I’m seeing.

Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network

So Chris, let’s talk about, so I’m a believer that eventually, and especially in today’s day and age, just like the Bloomberg data analysts found this trend, again, I haven’t validated their responses, I have to take them at their word. It brings up an issue that I think should be talked about, but is there, eventually people are gonna get caught, right? I mean, this is gonna bubble up.

So if you’re a member of the financial services industry, is it better just to put the facts out? Like when it comes to private equity or any type of investment in a retirement plan, do the due diligence, run it through a process. And I think you’ll come to, if you follow a transparent process and a thoughtful process and an honest process, you’ll come to the right conclusion.

Is that really the only answer here to things like this?

Chris Tobe, CFA, CAIA, Hackett Group

I mean, that is a good answer and that’s what people should be doing. And fiduciaries, a lot of the people listening will want to do that. But there’s two different rules in 401k and we’ve talked about this before.

There’s what I call the litigation universe, which is the 8,000 plans over 100 million in size. And then the rest of it, the other 750,000 plans under 100 million who just rely on the DOL, which is, I think have gone backwards in recent years and never was really, it never really was on top investments. DOL was so busy chasing down the contractor in Florida who took all the cash out of the 401k and took it with him and absconded with it.

Just pure criminal stuff to really work on investment fees and things like that. DOL doesn’t have enough staff to cover that. So that pretty much happens there.

So we’ve got two different worlds. So if you’re advising under plans under 100 million, it’s probably gonna be business as usual. It’s the ones over 100 million where you’re gonna have to, as an advisor, wanna take a look here because of the litigation risk.

Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network

Yeah. Well, I think it is. And I think that I’ll accept your distinction in terms of different type of plans.

Candidly, if you’re an advisor, where are you gonna spend your efforts? You wanna spend your efforts of where you’re gonna optimize your opportunity. You typically are paid in either a flat retainer fee or you’re paid a percentage of assets.

But obviously the larger the plans, the more opportunity. But also the more competition, right, Chris?

Chris Tobe, CFA, CAIA, Hackett Group

Well, I think it will be niches. And then if you’re a smaller niche player, you can use different, you’ve got a lot more leeway. Once you get to over 100 million, you start getting more, there actually gonna be almost different business models in a way, I think.

And so that as an advisor, you may want to pick a lane or pick where you wanna be for a lot of reasons because economists get experience in other things that you may wanna pick, but different lanes have different rules. And you may, as an advisor, wanna pick a lane. Now, a lot of times you get business out of who knows where and you don’t pick your lane exactly.

But as much as you can control it, it may be for an advisor, it may be wise to look at these different size plans and lanes differently as you market and actually deal with your plans.

Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network

So, Chris, I could talk to you about this for a while and I think we’re gonna have to bring you backs, but I do have to wrap up the show. I do wanna kind of follow up for what consumers can do because at the end of the day, we’re at least on this network. And I think this is why you advocate for the things you advocate is the end user, the consumer, the citizen, the person that’s in these plans that, look, they’re smart people, but they don’t have the expertise that you or I have or candidly, the others in the industry.

So what should they be looking for when it comes to news articles, information from AI, social media posts, how do they stay on the straight and narrow to make sure they’re getting the right information?

Chris Tobe, CFA, CAIA, Hackett Group

Again, if I had to make a suggestion to somebody, let’s say, and again, a lot of people are smart people, they’ll be engineers, just to say, I would just take my plan, I’d take my statement, get it on the web and I’d take maybe the 5,500 that’s available from the IRS on the web and attach it and say, hey, tell me what’s wrong with my plan. And it will give you 10 times the information and 100 times the value of the information that you would get from reading 1,000 articles. I mean, I hate to say that, but AI is that powerful because it’ll send you to the right articles, it’ll link it to you, it’ll tell you, it’ll do it specifically to your plan and it’s not trying to sell you anything.

Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network

But Chris, and again, I do have to go, but wasn’t AI created by humans and couldn’t AI be tainted based on how it was trained? So is that?

Chris Tobe, CFA, CAIA, Hackett Group

Yes, I think that is a very big concern and we’ve already seen some talk about that more on political things that AI is being trained to avoid to do stuff. But it could do it on this type of issue, these type of issues as well. So far, again, but my AI is so trained and when I go in there, I put my former articles in so it likes to agree with me, which of course is I like.

Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network

Well, of course you like that, but is that, and I’m not throwing stones at you, I’m saying, but that you have a perspective and there may be another perspective. So I think that’s a broader issue. Chris, look, I’ve got to leave it there.

I always enjoy talking with you. You bring some thoughtful analysis and look, we’re gonna have you back on the program. We look forward to having you back very soon, sir.

All right, thank you very much, Jeff. It’s always a pleasure.