Amjad Hussain

Jul 22, 2024

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Vanilla’s AI Principles: How Vanilla Is Delivering AI to Estate Planning with a Balanced Approach

We think a lot about artificial intelligence at Vanilla. The promise of AI is enormous – arguably greater than any new technology to come along since the dawn of the internet – and yet it is in its infancy and carries some risk, especially if not approached carefully. At Vanilla, we are thrilled by the prospect of how AI can improve the everyday lives of our customers and their clients, making estate planning more efficient and delivering insights, but we are keenly aware that we operate in a sensitive space. The security of customer and client data is sacrosanct, and we build and innovate while always keeping that in mind. 

In an effort to clarify how we approach AI, for ourselves and for our customers, we have come together internally to define our specific approach to AI. We’d like to share it so that you can understand how we are thoughtfully incorporating artificial intelligence into our product.

Guiding principles

1. Productivity: We believe in building AI solutions that simplify existing workflows, allowing users to focus on high-impact work.
2. Accuracy: We build solutions with transparency and accuracy in mind so you are always in control and know the source of information and recommendation you receive.
3. Customer Trust: Security and customer trust are our top priority at Vanilla, and everything we do works backwards from that. Our AI solutions never train the models with customer data.

Simple, right? Just three principles that guide the way we think about how we plan and build and iterate with AI. These principles make it easier for us to pinpoint what is worth pursuing in service of our customers, and what is worth leaving on the cutting room floor because of the dangers that it imposes. 

How Vanilla trains its AI model

We created V/AI, Vanilla’s AI engine, through the lens of these values, infusing it into every part of our product, but doing it in such a way that customers can feel comfortable that they and their clients are secure. We train our AI model, which was purpose-built for estate planning, on materials vetted by legal professionals. To deliver the best outcomes, we use and test multiple AI large-language models. Although customers reap the benefits of V/AI, client data is not stored or used to train the AI outside of anonymous statistical information. 

Here are some of the exciting advances in V/AI:

Summarizing existing estate plans with AI

Whether you are using Vanilla for your estate abstractions or having your own internal planning team do the work, V/AI makes the process quicker and easier, saving time for the team by identifying key information in documents. For the sake of transparency and verification, V/AI will highlight where in the documents it’s found the information, so you can ensure it’s accurate. V/AI is already making onboarding far easier, and be on the lookout for additional enhancements coming soon that will make the process even better.

V/AI Copilot

Estate planning is complex. We’ve created a chat feature, V/AI Copilot, that helps you along the journey, no matter where you are. The chat allows you to ask all kinds of questions related to estate planning, and will serve up answers based on training data written by subject matter experts. 

Insights from V/AI

Vanilla is infusing AI throughout the app, to provide quick insights for advisors and attorneys related to their clients. V/AI Insights will provide opportunities and scenarios based on client specifications. Look for these insights to be integrated more deeply into the Vanilla platform in the months ahead.

Moving forward, with care 

One of the secrets to Vanilla’s success is that we build in partnership with our customers. We are in constant dialogue with advisors, planners, attorneys, business leaders and technical leaders to understand their needs and concerns. As we continue to add functionality to our platform, in particular in regards to AI, we welcome your input and feedback. If you want to see V/AI in action today, please schedule a demo with our team. Let’s build together!