Chris Howell

After 100 Mercia AI blogs, founder Christopher Howell reflects on what local AI, work, sport, forecasting, infrastructure and community taught him about using AI responsibly.

AI assistants can explain mortgages, pensions, tax, investments and business finances in remarkably clear language. That does not mean they understand your financial circumstances. Tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot and Perplexity can be useful starting points when you are trying to make sense of money. They can translate jargon, organise information and help you prepare questions. The danger comes when a helpful explanation begins to feel like personalised...

For the first few years of mainstream AI adoption, many people got used to a simple idea: pay a monthly fee, use the tool, and do not think too much about what each prompt costs. That period is starting to change. More AI tools are moving towards usage-based pricing, credits, tokens, premium requests, or limits on heavier features. This shift is being driven by the real cost of running large models, especially for tasks that require long context windows, complex reasoning, or repeated...