2026 An AI Odyssey, Part 1

This article was originally posted to Steve Leimberg’s Estate Planning Email Newsletter – Archive Message #3265.

Arthur C. Clarke’s 1968 novel 2001: A Space Odyssey and Stanley Kubrick’s film introduced many readers and viewers to HAL 9000, a ship’s computer that spoke like a person, managed complex systems, and ultimately malfunctioned in a way that put human life at risk. The story was memorable not only because HAL was powerful, but because HAL’s failure showed how quickly humans will trust a system that feels confident and intelligent.

Today we have multiple artificial intelligence (AI) platforms that can perform tasks that were science fiction when 2001 was written. For tax, estate planning, and financial professionals, the practical question is not whether AI is impressive. The practical question is whether it can be integrated into a professional workflow to save time, reduce costs, and improve quality without compromising confidentiality.

Many professionals are apprehensive regarding the use of AI in their practices, and not without good cause. The case of Mata v. Avianca, Inc., serves as a cautionary tale, where lawyers failed to understand the generative AI application ChatGPT before adopting it for legal research. However, lawyers then cited cases provided by ChatGPT in a court filing. Unfortunately, the cases were fictitious and there was no precedent for the position taken because of these “hallucinations.” The attorneys were sanctioned for not researching the information provided by ChatGPT. While this case, and others like it should create respect for the pitfalls using AI presents, it should not deter practitioners from carefully reviewing and adopting the use of AI in certain aspects of their practice.

AI has come a long way since 2023. Those who tried it one or more years ago may be very surprised at how far along it has come, and how effective it can be using multiple AI models to critique, correct, and build upon one another with helpful human nudges. This can be extremely productive, and also enjoyable.

You have to provide very specific instructions to AI. In the old show, Get Smart, Agent 86 and Robot interact:

Agent 86: “Answer the door, Robot!”

Robot: “I’m sorry, Door, what was the question?”

[the door was silent]

This newsletter provides practical principles for practitioners to consider when determining how to integrate AI safely and reliably into their practice and then offers ten examples of how these tools can improve the efficiency and effectiveness of tax, estate planning, and financial professionals. While these examples may not all work for each practitioner’s specific practice, considering each of these AI examples and many other ways AI can be used may help practitioners begin to understand unique ways that AI may be integrated into their practice.

The authors regularly use a number of AI tools, including CoPilot, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and EstateView’s aggregation platform, which presently has a free version at EstateViewAI.com. Other platforms can provide excellent results as evidence by the growing number of users and the experience that they are having.

To read the full article, click here.