Gene Farrell

Sep 11, 2026

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On Agentic Estate Planning, A letter from Vanilla CEO Gene Farrell

CEO Gene Farrell shares Vanilla’s vision for agentic estate planning and how AI will help advisors deliver more proactive planning.

To the advisors we serve, our clients, our team, and our partners,

This week we announced the next chapter of Vanilla, agentic estate planning.

Most Americans don’t have an estate plan even though most of them know they should. That gap has been sitting in plain view for decades, and it persists because the work was built by hand and priced accordingly. Your client got referred out, waited weeks, paid thousands for documents nobody could tell them were any good, and it was mainly reserved for the wealthy. So most families never got one, and when that happens a court steps in, state law decides who inherits, and it plays out in public over months or longer.

This is personal for me. When my parents passed away, there was no plan in place, and I learned firsthand what that puts a family through. You’re grieving, and at the same time you’re making decisions you’re not prepared to make, without knowing what that person would have wanted. It doesn’t matter how much or how little there is. What’s hard is the not knowing, and the fact that the person who could have told you is gone. I don’t want another family to go through that, and I don’t think they should have to.

I believe estate planning is the most powerful thing an advisor can do for a client. More than performance or a financial plan because it’s the one conversation where you have to understand someone’s entire life. What they own, how the family actually works, what they care about, how they want to be remembered. Once you know a client that well, you’re a different advisor to them. You meet the kids, and you’re still there after the money moves. Advisors who do this work keep clients longer and keep the family after the transfer.

A legacy that spans generations doesn’t happen because someone signed a document. It happens because somebody stayed close enough to that family to keep the plan true to their life as generations changed. Advisors are the only ones who can do that at any real scale, and there will never be enough estate attorneys to do it instead. So the question we keep asking is how many clients one advisor can serve this way. If you can only do it well for thirty households, most of your book goes unplanned. Every bit of capacity we give you is another family that gets a plan that actually holds.

The first thing we had to do was bring the work inside your practice. Three months of attorney time became an afternoon of yours, with a plan visual enough that a client could see what it meant for their family. Estate health check, document creation, modeling scenarios, and now Vanilla Safe™, so the whole life cycle sits in one place.

Then we kept hearing the same thing from advisors. They wanted to bring estate planning to their clients, and they weren’t confident in their own estate planning knowledge. That’s fair. It’s a specialized discipline and nobody expects you to have practiced it for twenty years. But it showed us the limit of what we’d built, because everything we made was reactive. It waited on you to know which client to open, and it waited on you to know what to ask once you got there. A copilot doesn’t help much when you don’t know what questions to ask.

This next chapter of Vanilla is evolving the platform to be agentic so AI can do the work advisors actually need done. 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.

VAI will work across your entire book, watching what changes in your clients’ lives and in the law, and figuring out what that means for each family. Monday morning you get a handful of clients worth calling, with the reasoning attached and every item traced to the document it came from. Open one and it will tell you the next best action, model the scenarios, and help you explain the concept to your client in language they’ll follow. You walk into that meeting and look like an expert, because you have one working alongside you.

You still decide what happens. Estate planning is hard to undo, and a trust funded wrong isn’t something you clean up at the next rebalance. VAI brings you what it found and the reasoning behind it. You have the relationship and the license, so the call is yours. That’s a principle rather than a limitation, and it isn’t going to change no matter how good the technology gets.

The order we built this in matters too. People, expertise, then AI. Our in-house trust and estate team and 190+ years of their experience decided what gets flagged and what the right next move is, including our co-founder Steve Lockshin, who has spent his career doing estate planning at the highest level.

To our team, who’s doing an immense amount of hard work behind the scenes, thank you. To the advisors who have been with us since the early days and built real practices around this work, you showed everyone else what was possible. And to the firms who bet on estate planning before it was obvious, you made the case for us.

We’ll be at Future Proof Festival next week previewing the next evolution of VAI so come see it for yourself.

This is just the beginning.

Gene Farrell
CEO, Vanilla