Could Retirement Planning Be the Next AI Frontier for Advisors?

In a recent article for the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, Luke Delorme, director of financial planning at Tableaux Wealth in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, explored the potential applications. (True to the spirit of the piece, a postscript at the end of the article disclosed that "the author uses AI tools, including Claude, to assist with editing and reviewing written content.")

Delorme told ThinkAdvisor that participating in last month's Future Proof Citywide conference in Miami Beach, Florida, opened his eyes to the possibilities of the technology in his own firm.

The firm uses several tools with embedded AI features. These include tools provided by his custodians, Schwab and Fidelity; the financial planning software eMoney Advisor; and the tax planning software Holistiplan. However, these are siloed from one another. In the future, Delorme said, his firm will be exploring adding AI agents to help tie everything together.

"Then I can go in and ask it questions like, 'Find all of my clients that are in early retirement who don't have a ton of income, have a lot of tax-deferred assets and might benefit from a Roth conversion,' and it can go and look at all of the data and find that information for me, which potentially saves a lot of time," he said.

The next potential step for the AI agents could be to draft an email to those clients that says, "Let's take a look at a Roth conversion for you."

"It still requires a lot of human input, obviously, but it's an opportunity to be able to service more clients," he said.

For many, though, these developments are still theoretical. Melissa Caro, founder of My Retirement Network, said most of the advisors she works with are not using AI to do retirement planning. Where AI is showing up the most is in efficiency, she said, not to replace analysis or recommendations.

"It's being used around the edges of the practice," she said. "Meeting transcription and note-taking tools are almost universal at this point."

The reason AI hasn't moved deeper into retirement planning is simple, said Caro: Advisors are still accountable for accuracy.

"You can't hand off a recommendation to a tool and say, 'The AI got it wrong,'" she said. "Compliance doesn't allow for that, and frankly, neither do clients."

Overall, Caro said, most clients don't care that AI is being used behind the scenes if the experience improves.

"Faster follow-up, clearer summaries, fewer mistakes: That's what they notice," she said. "They're not asking whether AI generated the meeting notes. Accuracy is still a real concern. Not because AI is inherently unreliable, but because it can sound confident when it's wrong. That makes oversight nonnegotiable."

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