AI chatbots can write a poem, do your homework, draft lawsuits, and maybe even take your job, if the hype is to be believed. Can they handle your investments, too? While the use of artificial intelligence in the realm of financial advice is nothing new--"robo-advisors" have been around for years, some of which use AI--the chatbot technology is rapidly becoming more accessible to individual investors. Google's Bard and Microsoft's chatbot, powered by ChatGPT and integrated into its Bing search engine, can interact with users in plain English and can engage in surprisingly human-seeming interactions. To test the investing abilities of Microsoft and Google's respective products, we challenged each one to pick two stocks--one growth stock and one value stock--and see how they did over a three-week span compared to one another as well as a human.

Artificial intelligence burst onto Wall Street several years ago, to fanfare and hope. Unfortunately, AI-based investing strategies have struggled to live up to some of the more inflated expectations for their performance. There is no denying these strategies' theoretical promise. By being able to sift through otherwise prohibitively large amounts of data, and then "learn" from it, AI is supposed to be able to discover profitable patterns that were previously invisible to mere mortals.