RightCapital has launched an AI planning agent embedded directly within its platform, claiming the tool is the first of its kind built specifically for financial planning.
The company says its new Iris agent goes beyond prior AI features by actively interpreting client data, surfacing planning anomalies, and running retirement simulations inside the advisor workflow – without requiring advisors to toggle between applications.
The launch arrives as financial planning software providers race to layer artificial intelligence into their core products. Whether the industry-first claim holds up is likely to be debated as rival platforms develop competing roadmaps featuring similar capabilities.
Iris operates through three core functions. A "Double Check" feature scans client profiles for missing data or inconsistencies, flagging how gaps may be distorting plan outcomes. A "Cash Flow Reviews" function surfaces assumption risks and planning gaps that could affect projections. A third tool, "Plan Builder," allows advisors to set a probability-of-success target and receive three distinct strategies based on which plan components a client is open to adjusting – retirement age or living expenses, for example.
All outputs generated by Iris are drawn exclusively from RightCapital's own calculation engine. The agent does not pull information from outside sources, a design decision the company frames as a compliance consideration for advisors navigating regulatory scrutiny around AI adoption. Firm-level access controls allow compliance officers to govern which staff members can use the tool.
Iris is available at no additional cost to advisors on RightCapital's Premium and Platinum subscription tiers. The launch follows RightCapital's earlier release of Smart Import, which the company says reduced manual data entry time by at least 70% among users by reading client documents and translating relevant data into plan inputs.
In the 2026 T3/Inside Information Software Survey, which collected responses from 2,906 advisory firms, eMoney topped the planning software category with approximately 35.6% market share among survey respondents. MoneyGuidePro ranked second at roughly 24%. while RightCapital followed closely on third with a 21% chunk of the reported market, driven most strongly by its popularity among newer advisors and smaller firms.
Despite its third-place market share position, RightCapital posted one of the stronger user satisfaction scores in the category. The T3 survey gave it an average user rating of 8.40 out of 10, ahead of eMoney at 8.14 and MoneyGuidePro at 7.62.
The compliance framing RightCapital has built around Iris reflects a broader concern in the industry. Leadership at the Securities and Exchange Commission and FINRA have both flagged AI-related risks and considerations, including concerns about the accuracy of AI-generated outputs and supervisory frameworks for AI use.
RightCapital's decision to restrict Iris to its own calculation engine – rather than querying external data or general-purpose language models – addresses one of the more commonly cited concerns: that AI outputs in an advisory context could be difficult to supervise or verify.
FINRA's latest regulatory oversight report from December highlighted the emerging trend around AI agents, which it noted "can interact within an environment, plan, make decisions and take action to achieve specific goals without predefined rules or logic programming."
While acknowledging many potential benefits from AI agents, FINRA also pointed to notable risks and challenges that could harm investors, firms, or the broader markets. That includes agents potentially acting autonomously without human validation, going beond the scope or authority they were intended form, and storing or misusing sensitive information.
"Firms exploring and developing AI agents may wish to consider whether the autonomous nature of AI agents presents the firm with novel regulatory, supervisory or operational considerations," FINRA said. "The rapidly evolving landscape and capabilities of AI agents may call for supervisory processes that are specific to the type and scope of the AI agent being implemented."
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