Your HNW clients need an estate plan. AI is changing what they expect you to deliver.

RIA Edge’s 2026 Outlook Survey found 53% of firms already offering trust and estate planning plan to expand it in 2026; 66% of $500M+ firms expect expansion. T3 survey data shows estate planning software adoption is up 259% over two years.

The platform layer is now funded for scale. Wealth.com closed a $65M Series B in April 2026; its Ester engine processed 100,000+ estate documents in 2025. Trust & Will generates advisor-ready estate summary PDFs from uploaded documents. Vanilla now ships into independent RIAs through Betterment’s custodial network on the back of an Insight Partners–led round.

Mariner reports a 200% revenue-growth-rate increase among advisors who adopted Vanilla as part of their planning process, across a 700+ advisor deployment. This figure comes from Vanilla’s marketing channel and Mariner’s own attribution: directional evidence from the firms involved, not independent benchmarking.

Client expectations are shifting on the document-production layer specifically, not on the advice layer. Trust & Will’s 2026 Estate Planning Report found 30% of Americans now trust AI advice more than a human attorney for estate planning, up from 20% in 2025, and 46% among Gen Z. Only 5% would use AI for documents without attorney review. The opening for the firm sits exactly where clients won’t trust AI alone: document strategy, not document production.

The mid-market RIA already has the HNW client’s trust and the cross-discipline relationships: accountant, attorney, family. What it usually doesn’t have is a productized estate-planning offering with a named scope and a named price. Platforms like Wealth.com, Trust & Will, and Vanilla now make the document layer rentable, which is the part a smaller firm couldn’t cost-effectively build before. The firm’s real product is the strategy, the family conversation, and the attorney coordination. AI-native consumer apps can’t ship any of the three.