Estate planning, like any advisory service in the accounting world, is concerned with dollars and cents. But, like other advisory areas relatively resistant to AI disruption, it is also concerned with human relationships and feelings connected with what is typically understood to be a very emotionally sensitive topic: death. It's not even a question of whether or not AI could do an estate planning engagement on its own but whether the client would even want it to. David Nelson, an estate planning specialist with top 25 firm Aprio, noted that the highly personal nature of estate planning means it would be difficult to consider AI taking over the process.
"Some mathematically driven fields may see automation sooner. Estate planning, however, is highly personal. At the end of the day, you're sitting down with someone to talk about their mortality. There's intrinsic value in human interaction for discussions like that," said Nelson.
Nelson himself said he has been using AI primarily as a way to synthesize information sources in order to produce an analysis of the tax ramifications of a given plan, which in turn also helps with developing plans based on the data they find. He also uses it to analyze documents, particularly long and dense ones, that can help spot issues that the humans missed, such as contradictions in the plan itself or conflicting effects from its various provisions.
Overall, Nelson treats AI as a research tool. Looking at his field overall, he said that the estate planning world has picked up the technology, but not as deeply or as fervently as other specializations. People use AI tools fairly regularly for analysis or plan development, but it's not a dominant part of the practice. It is not even used in the calculations. While no one is using paper and pencil to determine estate tax implications, professions are still mostly using "legacy number-crunching software." Part of this might be because, so far, he has not seen an AI model that can perform the level of analysis he and professionals like himself do regularly. "On our end, AI is still a tool to guide analysis. But as far as I've seen, AI can't yet produce the kind of comprehensive analysis we need. For example, if a client comes in with an estate plan that includes various assets—an S corporation, marketable securities, a C corporation, and trusts to hold portions of those assets—the tax implications of each are different. The complexity increases when you factor in a trust as an owner. AI isn't yet able to aggregate and synthesize all of those issues into a cohesive analysis," he said.
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Hanna Dameron, an attorney with law firm ArentFox who has spoken at accounting conferences on the role of AI in estate planning, added that AI is not at the point where it can understand the complex human relationships and social factors that drive many engagements. She said you could take two different clients with the exact same assets and the exact same number of children and there may be 15 different plans that could be appropriate for them depending on things like how they feel about their various family members, how they view future investments, how they want their children to access their money, and more. Walking clients through this requires the emotional intelligence to understand their goals and explain to them in plain language how they could make a plan to accomplish them. She did not feel confident AI would be able to handle these emotional complexities just yet.
"Estate administration is a very emotional process. If you have the family members squabbling over who gets grandma's painting, you can certainly see a need for a human to come in and help mediate those disputes. But it's also just the emotional process of 'somebody's got to go through the boxes and figure out where this asset might be' or 'there's an insurance policy we never heard about. How does that make me feel that this family member never told me about that insurance policy?' So, it's not just dealing with the administration of dollars and cents. You're looking at a deep financial portrait of somebody's life and what they've left behind. And there can be a lot of emotions and questions that come up in that," she said.
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She noted that she speaks from experience, having shifted into estate planning after the death of her own mother and being the executor of her will, which was a difficult experience both emotionally and administratively.
"It made me feel very passionate about helping families set up a plan and then administer the plan with compassion and emotion. So, I think, when somebody is in a grieving state, of course, they want somebody to talk to, not just about sorting out what they're dealing with, but also dealing with a legacy," she said.
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