The Shifting Landscape of Estate Planning: How Consumer Attitudes Toward AI Are Redefining the Industry

For years, industry experts have debated endlessly why most Americans still delay creating a formal estate plan. Common explanations point to prohibitive costs, overly complicated processes, and the universal discomfort of confronting one’s own mortality. While each of these claims holds a kernel of truth, our latest data reveals that many of these long-standing barriers are falling faster than ever before.

Our 2026 Estate Planning Report draws on insights from a national survey of 5,000 U.S. adults, fielded by Trust & Will between January and February of this year. The survey outlines the top reasons Americans cite for going without an estate plan: 17% report a lack of clarity on where to start, 23% blame procrastination, and 27% believe they do not own enough assets to justify creating a formal plan. These are very real, tangible challenges, but our data shows all three have shrunk significantly over the past 12 months. Specifically, procrastination fell 7 percentage points, uncertainty about how to get started dropped 10 percentage points, and cost-related concerns fell by 9 points. Put simply, the traditional frictions that kept people from planning have reduced dramatically.

Yet even with these barriers receding, 56% of Americans still lack any formal estate planning documents — a figure that has barely changed from last year. This unclosed gap is what keeps me up at night, and it makes another key finding from our study worthy of close attention. In just one year, the share of Americans who trust artificial intelligence more than a human attorney for estate planning guidance jumped 10 percentage points, rising from 20% to 30%. Skepticism of AI for this use case fell by the exact same margin.

This marks a substantial shift in consumer sentiment for an industry that has resisted widespread change for decades. It also reflects a clear evolution in how people who are hesitant about AI frame their concerns. Back in 2025, most concerns were philosophical: Should a machine make decisions that will shape my family’s future? By 2026, those big-picture questions have been replaced by far more practical concerns: Will AI get this right? Is my personal data secure?

This is not a small difference in framing. This shift indicates that most consumers have already accepted the core idea of using AI to support estate planning. They are no longer debating whether AI belongs in the process at all — they are now evaluating whether they can trust AI tools to execute the work properly. This inflection point is common across nearly every industry as AI adoption begins to accelerate.

This change in how consumers think about AI has also reshaped how we approach product development at Trust & Will. For years, we have built a platform that gives users step-by-step guidance to create attorney-approved, state-specific estate plans. We did not start out using AI in our core process: early on, the technology was not reliable enough for such high-stakes decisions, and consumer trust in AI for this work was not widespread. We originally focused on simply connecting users to the correct documents aligned with their personal circumstances and local jurisdiction rules.

As both AI technology and consumer comfort matured, we faced a clear strategic choice: add AI as a surface-level feature on top of the workflows we had already built, or rebuild our entire platform with AI as its foundation. We chose the second path, and we remain clear that AI only adds value here when implemented with strict rigor and appropriate human oversight.

Today, we are integrating AI to help consumers and advisors navigate complex issues in real time, flag gaps in existing estate plans, and extract critical information from old documents that would otherwise sit untouched in a filing cabinet. Our core goal remains the same: to make the entire estate planning process effortless for every user.