Timing is everything. I’m in the middle of a big budgeting overhaul at the minute. Slighly tired of seeing more money going out monthly than is coming in. Conveniently, today Revolut has launched AIR, short for AI by Revolut. This is a chat based assistant built into the Revolut app that you can ask things like how much you spent on groceries last month, how a particular stock in your portfolio is doing, or what subscriptions are quietly draining your account. You open it by swiping down from the middle of your home screen, or by going into Profile, then Chats, then AIR.
What AIR does
AIR is a search bar for your own financial data. You can ask it for a breakdown of your spending in a given month or category, get a quick update on how your investments are performing, see what subscriptions you’re paying for and cancel the ones you forgot about, or freeze a lost card without hunting for the right menu.
It also handles travel planning, so you can describe the kind of trip you want and it’ll suggest options, and it lets you redeem RevPoints directly for things like eSIMs or lounge passes instead of clicking through several screens to find the redemption page.
Revolut already has a dedicated budgeting and spending tracker in the app (Revolut’s existing budget planner) that does most of this visually. Personally, I’ve struggled to get that setup with start dates of months never aligning to salary and that kind of thing.
What AIR changes is the interface. Instead of tapping into three or four different sections to piece together a picture of your month, you just ask the question directly. This is potentially a more user friendly way to budget with your bank.T
What about your data?
AI and your financial data can be a jarring sentence, even if I’ve been lobbing statements into Claude myself. Revolut says AIR runs under a zero data retention policy, meaning the third party AI partners powering it don’t store your information or use it to train their own models.
That said, a policy is a claim, not an independent audit. The same way Google’s DNS policies are laid out that I recently researched for Vodafone’s outage over the weekend.
The key point here is that Revolut Bank operates under a Lithuanian banking licence but remains subject to the Central Bank of Ireland’s consumer protection rules for customers here. Generally speaking, it can feel uneasy seeing banks pushing technical boundaries in Ireland given our banks have been playing it safe for years.
Will it actually help you budget?
Given where I’m at with my own finances right now, this is the bit I care about most. My plan is to actually use AIR for the boring, specific questions I’d normally answer by scrolling back through statements, things like what I spent on takeaways this month or whether a subscription I forgot about is still coming out. Or simply asking where am I bleeding money this money or if I’m forecasting to hit my targets and if not, what can we swing.
If it saves me the five minutes of digging every time, that’s a genuine win, even if the underlying data was always sitting there in the budget planner anyway.
What it won’t do is force better habits on you. Asking an AI assistant how much you spent on coffee doesn’t stop you spending it. The value here is speed of information, not willpower, and it’s worth being honest with yourself about which one you’re actually short on.
The tl;dr
AIR is a sensible, low risk addition if you’re already banking with Revolut, and a handy way to get quick answers without wading through menus. It’s not a reason to switch banks on its own, and it’s not the financial breakthrough the announcement makes it sound like, but it is another view of what banking of tomorrow could be. If you’re a Revolut customer in Ireland, you can start using it now for free by swiping down from your home screen or heading to Profile, then Chats, then AIR.
