AI has gradually evolved over the past several decades – initially emerging in specialized fields before accelerating exponentially and reaching the mainstream in recent years. Its rising popularity has brought powerful technologies into households and businesses alike, highlighting some of its vast capabilities and future potential.
A recent McKinsey Global Survey reported that 78% of organizations had already integrated AI into their operations by July 2024. Looking to the future, AI’s momentum and impact are expected to continue, with forecasts suggesting it could add almost $7 trillion to the global economy over a 10-year period.
AI is revolutionizing countless industries across the globe, and estate planning is no exception. This is welcome news, given that the number of Americans with an estate plan has declined since 2022 according to Caring.com. Despite its importance, estate planning has historically been complex, costly and time-intensive. AI is changing that.
Unleashing Expert-Backed AI To Revolutionize Estate Planning
Recent technological advancements have rapidly increased the efficiency, affordability and attainability of estate planning, enabling financial advisors to offer these services through convenient online platforms. However, given the sensitivity and complexity of the data involved, it’s critical for advisors to properly vet potential AI-backed estate planning solutions before adopting them.
Creating AI applications for a specialized industry like estate planning requires more than engineering breakthroughs. It demands deep collaboration from humans with legal, financial and engineering expertise to provide comprehensive, personalized and trustworthy services.
Because AI may involve training on a foundation of annotated, high-quality datasets, it is likely only as good as the human intelligence that informs it. Credible AI-backed estate planning providers incorporate a “human-in-the-loop” validation process, where legal experts review and confirm the AI-generated content before it is provided to clients. This additional layer of human oversight can help ensure that the outputs are both accurate and contextually relevant.
Credible AI-backed estate planning providers incorporate a “human-in-the-loop” validation process.
Although there is nothing stopping vendors from trying to circumvent professionally backed AI estate planning products, cutting corners comes with its own array of risks. The absence of expert human guidance when leveraging large language models (LLMs) can lead to AI hallucinations, security lapses and improper execution – all of which can render an estate plan invalid and, counterintuitively, lead to probate. This underscores the importance of advisors selecting AI applications developed with oversight from licensed estate attorneys and other financial planning professionals.
Empowering Advisors To Help Protect Client Estates
With the right estate planning application, AI’s capabilities can be a game changer for financial advisors and their clients. Tasks that once took weeks can now be accomplished in minutes, and advancements in speed, accuracy and functionality are continuously unfolding.
In its simplest form, AI can reduce tedious manual tasks, such as rapidly reviewing and summarizing existing estate planning documents and extracting scanned data to complete forms. AI can also simplify complex data – selectively extracting key information from documents, such as specific details of trusts, and presenting it in an easy-to-understand format. Beyond that, advisors can now generate visually appealing personalized documents for their clients, complete with reference notes that point back to original documents for easy verification.
Harnessing AI’s Potential To Unveil Endless Possibilities
The future of AI in estate planning is moving towards agentic AI workflows.
The future of AI in estate planning is moving towards agentic AI workflows – capable of enabling autonomous decision-making – and system-informed workflows that adapt to changing conditions. It will be capable of performing functions such as automating the tedious trust administration processes, rapidly modeling hundreds of scenarios to optimize for taxes and helping users navigate to the next best action.
As AI continues to evolve, the possibilities are seemingly endless. Its ability to process massive amounts of data and analyze it in mere seconds can reveal insights that humans might miss or take significantly more time to uncover.
AI has the potential to enable dynamic, real-time estate planning strategy models that adapt to changing regulations, family circumstances and market conditions, offering unprecedented levels of customization. It could also reveal insights about which strategies might be most beneficial in helping clients achieve their desired estate planning goals.
Eventually, it’s plausible that AI agents will collaborate like a team of experts – including trust and estate attorneys, CPAs, compliance professionals and financial advisors – to provide comprehensive estate planning support at a fraction of the current cost, all while maintaining the same level of service. However, for AI-backed estate planning to reach mass adoption, it must remain flexible, scalable and model-agnostic. Developers will need to design interoperable AI solutions that adapt to evolving LLMs and seamlessly integrate with different wealth management platforms.
With its vast potential, introducing agentic AI in estate planning will significantly elevate the bar for excellence.
Unlocking AI To Enhance Human Connections
AI’s vast capabilities are revolutionizing estate planning; however, it cannot replace human expertise. What it can do is work alongside legal and financial professionals to deliver estate planning applications that help advisors be more efficient and create scalable, repeatable processes to offer more services to their clients.
As an increasing number of AI-capable solutions become available, financial advisors can allocate more time to aspects of their business that require a human touch, like personally interacting with clients and strategizing.
Transforming Estate Planning Through Innovative Partnerships
As AI technology advances and its affordability increases, financial advisors will be better equipped than ever to offer coveted services such as estate planning at scale. Through collaboration with qualified estate planning partners, they can confidently integrate these essential offerings into their advisory practices, making them readily available to their clients.
Financial advisors will be better equipped than ever to offer coveted services such as estate planning at scale.
Even at this early stage of mainstream adoption, AI is already transforming estate planning – turning what was once a costly, time-intensive process into an accessible and convenient industry standard.
Seungwoo Son is Vice President of Applied AI at estate planning platform wealth.com.
