Posted by Hi, and welcome to Try AI for Growth, a baby podcast out of Make Space for Growth. Here I share short and sometimes surprising stories of how I’ve used technology to tackle everyday challenges. At home, at work and in business. I am your host, Sara Vicente Barreto and today, I want to tell you about how a cash gift turned into one of my favourite AI experiments so far.
The Back Story
A few months ago, my nine-year-old son received a cash gift from his godmother with one key goal: he should use it to buy shares. That was originally my idea, given he has been so interested in the reds and greens in Daddy’s Bloomberg screen. More than making him money, I wanted to use this as an opportunity to get him more familiar with some investment terms and questions.
He was very excited to think he could own part of a company, especially one that he knew. He was keen to buy his first share but I wanted to flip the question.
Not “Which company should he buy?”
But “How do you teach a nine-year-old to think about investing?”
What followed became a much bigger task than I ever expected (that’s usually the case with me). I thought I was creating a simple guide. Instead, ChatGPT and I ended up designing an entire learning experience—one conversation at a time.
Yes, you heard me right, I went back to my pal ChaGPT for this one. Why? Usage management.
Building an Investment Guide
My son loves facts. Lately, he has taken a real interest in big topics like politics, economics, and money. He likes understanding how money works. He is also the one in the house asking my husband how the market did, how many reds and greens, and what happened to the charts. When we told him about shares, he was super excited about the idea that, by buying a share, he could actually own a tiny part of a company. That was a curiosity sparkler.
I could, of course, have simply told him which company I thought was best (not that I do much stock investing anyway). Or I could have explained what a dividend is, what a P/E ratio is, or gone through a long list of financial concepts. But that didn’t feel right. I wanted him to understand how a company works, and how you can think of its worth.
As often happens these days, when I have an idea but I’m not entirely sure how to bring it to life, I opened ChatGPT. Initially, my request was fairly straightforward. I wanted a simple guide with a few criteria that would help him compare different companies. I started by suggesting some adult investing concepts—dividends, valuation, industries, diversification. But something interesting happened. Instead of simply expanding my list, the conversation started evolving my thinking.
The Experiment
Very quickly, the discussion moved away from financial ratios and towards questions.
- Instead of asking, “What’s the dividend yield?” we started asking, “Do you actually know what this company does?”
- Instead of teaching him about valuation, we asked, “Will this company still exist when you’re an adult?”
- Instead of focusing on numbers, we focused on curiosity.
That was when I knew I was onto something. So we kept going. I did not want the questions to be too long or complex, but I did want him to be able to understand the concept of a risk, of competitors and to ensure he truly understood what the products behind each company were.
Once we had the questions, I asked ChatGPT to create a printable guide. It did exactly that. It looked beautiful. It was also completely impractical. There was far too much information to fit comfortably onto one page. After a few iterations, we had a child-friendly guide. Alongside it, we had also done a scoring sheet with stars that would allow him to rate each company on each of the questions. Every iteration made the project slightly better.
One step further
Then I had another idea. Instead of asking my son to research companies himself, what if each company had its own profile? A one-pager that he can use as a reference for all his analysis.
We started with Nike. At first it looked like a fairly traditional company profile.
- What the company does.
- Its financial information.
- Some investment facts.
But again, something felt wrong, or boring. So we redesigned the whole thing.
- We added the company’s story. How old it is.
- What industry it operates in. Who its competitors are.
- What makes it special. What could go wrong.
- Interesting facts.
And as an add-on, a small box with new business vocabulary. Even little detective challenges so he could continue researching by himself. Every time I thought we were finished, another question appeared. Should we include the CEO? No. That changes all the time and doesn’t really teach him much. Should we include today’s share price? Again, no. Children naturally assume that an expensive share means a better company, and that’s exactly the misunderstanding I wanted to avoid. Instead, we replaced it with something much more meaningful.
“What would €100 invested twenty years ago be worth today?”
Suddenly we weren’t talking about prices. We were talking about patience. Long-term thinking. Compounding. Then another concern appeared. I didn’t want him to think that shares only go up. So we added another section showing that even great companies have difficult years.
Looking back now, what fascinates me isn’t any individual decision. It was, as before, the process. Every improvement came from questioning the previous version. Neither ChatGPT nor I knew what the finished guide would eventually look like. We discovered it together.
The Outcome
Eventually we ended up with something much richer than I had imagined at the beginning. An educational framework. One that encourages questions instead of providing answers. The unexpected benefit was what happened next.
Once we had designed the structure for one company, creating the others became incredibly fast.
Disney. Electronic Arts. Nintendo. Netflix. Ferrari. Spotify. GoPro. One after another.
The framework stayed consistent, while the stories changed. Each company profile took only a couple of minutes to generate, including the visual layout. On my own, I could never have done this with such depth, design and speed.
Instead of spending hours recreating the same format, I could focus on checking the content, refining the educational elements and deciding what would actually help my son learn.
And that’s exactly where I think AI shines. Not replacing your thinking. Amplifying it.
And the chosen stocks?
My son was delighted with the output. I printed it all out and made a little booklet. He reads them intently, and then we go through the scoring sheet together. We have gone through about 5 in detail, and he scores them (not always as I would, but I guess that is part of the process). The fun part is seeing the irrationality in investment – we go through all the questions, and when I ask his investment thesis, he answers:
“Because all my friends play this game!”
Clearly, we have some wood to chop. But I am happy to be laying down the groundwork for him to think through these concepts. He is still reading through all the company profiles. He loves the stories. He’s discovering companies he didn’t know. He’s comparing them and ranking them. And he is getting increasingly excited about deciding which tiny piece of a business he’d like to own.
We still haven’t chosen. And that’s exactly how I wanted it.
Lessons Learned
1. Start with a clear goal
I had a very specific goal: help my son learn how to think about investing. I was not trying to generate standard company profiles. The clearer your purpose, the more useful AI becomes.
2. Let your ideas evolve
One of the biggest mistakes people make is expecting the first answer to be the final answer. With or without AI. This project became successful because every conversation challenged the previous version. Don’t be afraid to change direction when a better idea appears.
3. Use AI as a brainstorming partner
Sometimes we think of AI as something that writes documents. Increasingly, I find its greatest value is helping me think. It asks different questions, suggests alternative structures and helps me see possibilities I hadn’t considered. And yes, at the end, it is pretty good at generating documents as well.
4. Build systems once, then reuse them
Designing the first company profile took time. Creating the next ten took minutes. Investing a little longer in the structure paid off enormously afterwards, and that’s a lesson that applies to many areas of work.
If you’re enjoying these experiments, I’d love it if you subscribed to the podcast and left a review. It really helps other curious leaders discover the show, and it encourages me to keep experimenting and sharing what I learn along the way.
This experiment reminded me that AI isn’t always about getting to an answer faster. Sometimes it’s about creating enough space to think differently. I thought I was building an investing guide. Instead, I built a way for my son to explore businesses, ask better questions and become genuinely curious about the world around him.
I still don’t know which company he’ll eventually choose. But if, years from now, he remembers not the name of the first share he bought, but how he learned to think about businesses, then this little experiment will have been worth every minute.
Thanks for listening, and until next time—keep experimenting and keep having fun.