About this episode

Johannes Seemann discusses the emotional aspects of money and the potential of generative AI in personal finance tools.

Most personal financial tools are built to run the numbers and optimize towards a budget. While that works for some, most people experience money as a lived relationship that doesn’t neatly fit into a spreadsheet. Johannes Seemann spent years interviewing people about their personal finances and came away with a different premise: Money is inherently emotional before it is mathematical. Accounting for people’s psychology and context first creates, he argues, creates the foundations to make smarter, more confident financial decisions. In this episode, Becca Carroll, IDEO's Chief Strategy Officer, talks with Johannes Seemann, founder of Sooner, about the problem space he knows so well, why he sees generative AI as a unique opportunity to design a solution for it, and what a genuinely human-centered approach to building an AI product looks like in practice. The conversation also gets technical. Becca and Johannes dig into the engineering and design challenges of building an AI moderator, from models that try to resolve human ambiguity rather than embrace it, to the normative assumptions they carry that can lead to biased interpretations. This is the first in a two-part series…

People in this episode

Host: Becca Carroll

Guest: Johannes Seemann

Topics covered

• emotional finance
• generative AI
• human-centered design
• personal finance tools
• financial decision making

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: IDEO, Sooner, Shared Context Lab

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