Vanilla Enters Its Next Chapter of Agentic Estate Planning

BELLEVUE, Wash.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Vanilla, the modern estate planning platform built for financial advisors, today announced its next chapter with agentic AI at the core. The company is making estate planning a more powerful and proactive practice that delivers greater value and impact to advisors and their entire client book. Vanilla's AI, VAI^Ⓡ, will work across the platform through specialized agents: reading documents to onboard new clients, building the client profile alongside the advisor, catching discrepancies as they surface, and flagging the planning opportunities worth acting on for advisor approval.

Some advisors have often hesitated to raise estate planning because of their lack of knowledge, and an AI that waits for a question is of little use to someone who doesn't know which one to ask. The next evolution of VAI is designed to be a coach and extend an advisor's work in three directions with confidence. An advisor can walk into any meeting knowing what the documents say and what they mean, with every conclusion cited to its source.

The work covers an advisor's entire client base rather than the largest twenty relationships, with VAI flagging changes in a client's life and in state and federal law. And what surfaces is the work that changes an outcome for a family, including unfunded trusts, beneficiary designations that no longer match the family, and insurance short of the estate's tax liability. The advisor decides what to act on.

"We’re evolving the platform to be agentic so AI can do the work advisors actually need done," said Gene Farrell, CEO of Vanilla. "VAI will be a coach for the advisor, catching what matters across the whole book, showing them where they can create real value for a client this week, and handing back the reasoning so they can walk into the room looking like an expert. The advisor decides what to do about it, because they're the one with the relationship and the license."

Vanilla is uniquely positioned to enable agentic planning at scale, having the deepest deterministic engine in the industry. The company’s extraction engine has read and structured more than 60,000 estate documents and modeled more than 32,000 estates before generative AI was available, so VAI runs on top of that engine rather than in place of it. The core planning calculations stay deterministic while the agents extend reach. Vanilla is the only patent-protected platform in the category with built-in de-identification, so client identifying data never reaches a language model.

The expertise came before the software. Vanilla's platform was shaped by its in-house trust and estate team, 15 professionals with more than 190 years of combined experience, alongside co-founder Steve Lockshin, who built one of the country's largest independent advisory firms on estate planning. The same in-house team is available to advisors through Vanilla Concierge, for hands-on support when a client's situation calls for it.

Additional agents will follow. VAI does not advise clients directly or replace an attorney, and Vanilla does not use client data to train any underlying model.

Advisors can preview the next evolution of VAI at Future Proof Festival in Huntington Beach, September 14 through 17, with general availability to follow later this year. More information on VAI is available at justvanilla.com/vai.

About Vanilla

Vanilla is the modern estate planning platform built for financial advisors. By transforming complex legal documents into clear, interactive visuals, Vanilla enables advisors to deliver more personal, impactful conversations around legacy, wealth transfer, and generational planning. With deep integrations, intuitive workflows, and expert support, Vanilla helps advisors bring estate planning into the heart of holistic financial advice. Learn more at justvanilla.com.