• I visited LGA's Chase Sapphire airport lounge to check out the meals, drinks, entertainment, and spa.
• Chase Sapphire lounge access is free for $550-per-year Chase Sapphire Reserve cardholders.
• However, travelers without the card can enter for free with a Priority Pass membership once a year.

A Chase Sapphire airport lounge opened in January at New York City's LaGuardia Airport and John F. Kennedy International Airport. There are also Chase Sapphire lounges in Boston and Hong Kong.

I got an exclusive tour of the credit-card lounge in LaGuardia's Terminal B in February.

The 21,850-square-foot space felt like a luxury hotel lobby.

I spotted thoughtfully designed seating areas, an upscale bar, a complimentary restaurant and buffet, extensive coffee bars, a peaceful coworking space, an arcade with an old-school jukebox, and a spa offering free facials.

Upstairs on the second floor, there were private suites as well as a mezzanine full of plants.

The lounge at LGA is open from 4:30 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. daily and is free for $550-per-year Chase Sapphire Reserve credit cardholders to visit whenever they have a flight departing within three hours.

All they have to do is activate their complimentary Priority Pass airport lounge membership that comes with the credit card.

However, during my tour from general manager Ioannis Tzielekis, I was surprised to learn that Chase Sapphire lounge access doesn't necessarily require a Chase card. In fact, you can get all the same complimentary amenities free of charge.

How to get into the airport lounge for free

There are two ways to get Chase Sapphire lounge access for free without the card, both of which require a boarding pass for a flight up to three hours away.

The easiest way is to travel with a Chase Sapphire Reserve cardholder who is allowed two free guests per visit. Any additional guests cost $27 per person.

Travelers don't have to know a Chase cardholder for the second option.

A Chase Sapphire representative told Business Insider that those who hold a Priority Pass membership without the card can enter for free once a year. Each additional visit costs $75.

The pass is complimentary with various travel credit cards from other banks, or it has a starting rate of $99 for those without any of the partnered card programs, according to the Priority Pass website.

While I was only visiting the lounge for a tour, knowing I could have a pleasant experience before boarding a long flight made me excited for my next trip to the airport — and keen to get a Priority Pass membership.

• Finance firms are keen on AI agents that can automate combinations of tasks.
• Demand for AI agents is giving birth to a new class of startups and VCs hungry to invest in them.
• It was a topic of conversation at the Evident AI Symposium in New York on Thursday.

"Talk to this like a teammate and treat it like a teammate."

That's Danny Goldman's guidance to private-equity customers of his startup, Mako AI, which offers a generative AI assistant for junior finance professionals and is backed by Khosla Ventures, an early investor in OpenAI.

His hope is that "engaging with Mako looks much more like engaging with a real human associate than a software tool," he previously told BI. Goldman, who worked in private equity before cofounding Mako AI, predicts that in a year or two, every junior on Wall Street will have their own AI direct report.

It's not just juniors, either. JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, is a "tremendous user" of the bank's generative AI assistant suite. Teresa Heitsenrether, JPMorgan's chief data and analytics officer, said at a conference last week that JPMorgan is working toward giving employees AI assistants that are specific to them and their jobs.

Wall Streeters, say hello to your new coworker. Across the industry, AI agents are beginning to permeate the labor force as assistants who can help humans prep for meetings, write their emails, and wade through troves of information to answer questions almost instantaneously.

In many cases, AI agents are still limited to specific, individual tasks like querying internal data and creating PowerPoints and emails. To take AI agents a step further, technologists and startup investors are fueling a shift to so-called multi-agent systems that coordinate several AI agents to complete more complex tasks more autonomously.

Some tech executives at the Evident AI Symposium said they could see a world with more artificial intelligence agents than humans by 2025. But what will work and life look like in an increasingly hybrid world with humans and bots? Well, that's still being worked out, according to a number of tech executives at the Evident AI Symposium Thursday.

"What's really exciting about agents is that we are still figuring out the tasks they're actually good at, the tools they know how to use, the tools we have to teach them how to use," said Gabriel Stengel, cofounder and CEO of Rogo, which is building the generative AI equivalent of a junior banker.

Another question that still needs to be answered is how to define when an agent is smarter or not than a human, said Kristin Milchanowski, chief AI and data officer of BMO Financial Group.

To some extent, benchmarking humans against AI agents is already happening. In a recent University of Cambridge study that compared who could run a business better, AI outperformed humans on most metrics including profitability, product design, and managing inventory. But they fell short when it came to making decisions on the fly.

Heitsenrether, speaking at the Evident AI conference, told the audience that, over time, she expects AI to be seamlessly embedded in an employee's workflow. By this time next year, she said that she hopes to have a clearer picture of what a more personalized AI assistant for each employee might look like.

But unlocking more autonomous uses of AI is going to require more than technological breakthroughs.

"We don't have a lot of trust right now in these systems," Sumitra Ganesh, a member of JPMorgan's AI research team, said at the symposium.

"We have to slow-walk it to release it to people who are experts who can verify the output and go, 'Okay, that looks fine, you can take that action,'" Ganesh said. "But that's kind of babysitting these agents at this point," she added. "But hopefully, it's like training wheels — at some point, we will be confident enough to let them go."

Brazil’s antitrust regulator Cade has ruled that Apple must lift restrictions on in-app purchases within 20 days, Reuters reports. Otherwise, if the iPhone maker doesn’t comply, it faces fines of $43,000 per day. This decision is the result of a complaint filed by e-commerce merchant Mercado Libre in 2022. If you’ve been following recent changes […]

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• Some parents fear their kids will waste money, sink into debt, and never move out.
• Teaching personal finance lessons to young children can set them up for success, Mark Berg says.
• The financial planner tells parents to foster independence in their kids even if it's uncomfortable.

Many parents worry their children will grow up to be bad with money, wind up in debt, and end up moving back home.

Mark Berg, who founded Timothy Financial Counsel in 2000, says there are steps parents can take to avoid that fate.

Here are five of Berg's top tips for setting kids up for financial success which he outlined on a recent episode of Morningstar's "The Long View" podcast.

1. Start with the basics

Parents can start teaching their children about personal finance when they're as young as six or seven, Berg said. They can explain how money works, give their kids an allowance and pocket change for doing chores and odd jobs, then encourage them to save up for a special purchase as a lesson in the rewards of working and delayed gratification, he said.

Limiting spending money also teaches kids about opportunity cost, reinforcing the idea that money is scarce and there are constraints on what they can afford.

Berg said that using physical currency helps kids grasp the concept of money. It's visual, and they can hold it in their hands and hand it over, the veteran financial planner said.

"It really helps them understand the true cost and trade-off" with money, he said, "whether it's buying ice cream or going to the store to buy a toy."

"It's also healthy to say no," Berg added. Families should "not just always give, even if you have the means to do it, because that's not reality."

2. Build good money habits

Once their child receives their first paycheck, parents can explain how much has gone toward paying taxes, and help them budget the rest between buying things they want and saving for college and retirement.

Berg advised opening a checking account for children early on, then getting a credit card as soon as possible to establish a credit history. That can give them earlier access to the bank funding they'll likely need for a big purchase like a first home.

He emphasized that kids should pay off their credit cards as they use them to avoid carrying a balance and paying interest or late fees.

3. No coddling

Parents should aim to turn their grown children into self-reliant adults without delay, Berg said.

"They need to be independent of their parents' lifestyle and creature comforts, and need to work through those hard decisions from an early age of the trade-offs of spending versus saving," he said.

Berg advised parents to stop paying for things like their kids' cell plans and car insurance as soon as possible. He recalled a client whose kids moved back home after college, and they only offered them six months of rent-free living before charging $400 a month for the next six months, then double that for the next six months, and so on. Parents can even give all the rent payments back as a lump sum when their child moves out, he added.

The veteran financial planner suggested parents be up front with their kids about how much they can contribute to their college funds. That can help guide their decisions about what schools they apply to and what financial aid they seek.

Similarly, if parents are paying for a wedding, they should set a clear budget even if it forces their child to compromise between the perfect dress and the ideal venue, Berg said. If they loan the money to their kid to buy a house, they need to be strict in getting repaid, he added.

Letting your teenagers work can help foster independence and good saving habits, teach them to manage their time better and be more efficient with their schoolwork, strengthen their character, and better appreciate their lifestyle as they're partly paying for it, Berg said.

He made an exception to his tough-love approach when it comes to family holidays and similar occasions. "I really think that family time, especially with aging parents and even grandparents, if they're still living, is really a great investment in the family dynamics — I think there's a lot of health to that."

4. Do no harm

Berg underscored that parents should never put their children in a tough financial position.

"I'd say the No. 1 principle is don't create a circumstance where your help creates a hurt," he said.

Berg gave the example of buying a home for a child who can't afford the maintenance and property taxes, and said those kinds of purchases "really lose the joy."

5. Pass wealth down early and carefully

"Start in the shallow end and work toward the deep end with your kids," Berg said, encouraging parents to give small amounts to their children over time instead of a lump sum after they die.

Parents could match the money their child makes from a summer job and put that amount in a savings account for them, he said. They could give money each year but earmark it for education or retirement to avoid lifestyle bloat or removing the incentive to work. They might even give a larger one-off amount as a test.

"It really gives you a snapshot, a small example of what their decision thinking will be like when they eventually potentially receive that much, much larger number of an inheritance down the road," Berg said.

"And it gives an opportunity not for the parent to micromanage, but the parent to observe the decisions that they make, be available to have conversations, really help guide and be there on the journey, on the path to help them make good financial decisions."