eMoney Advisor is preparing to launch an AI assistant for its CoPlanner planning tool, according to Brandon Heid, the company’s senior financial planning practice management consultant.
“We're looking to add what we call CoPlanner Chat,” he told InvestmentNews at the Schwab IMPACT event in Boston last week. “Right now, that is something that we're currently beta testing.”
CoPlanner is a rules-based tool that was launched in March and aims to generate financial plans in seconds. In September, eMoney Advisor was recognized in the InvestmentNews 2026 5-Star Technology report for CoPlanner.
“The CoPlanner tool today already looks at the client's fact set and determines what would be recommendations that are pertinent to that client or that kind of profile,” Heid said. The chat feature, he added, will be layered on top of that.
Heid described CoPlanner as the main driver, with the planning tool surfacing the recommendations. “The chat feature is the interface to how do I engage with the rest of the platform,” he added.
“So now you can actually go and ask for ‘hey, I would like to see what kind of real estate does this client have?' It will surface that data,” Heid said. “'Help me model a Roth conversion' – it’ll help you model that.”
Heid explained that the chat feature is expected to launch in 2027.
Like many industries, wealth management is seeing widespread use of AI. Recent research from Morningstar found that 80% of advisors now use AI in some form, up from 67% last year. Some 48% percent of the advisors surveyed in the Morningstar research said that AI had significantly or moderately improved their efficiency, up from 36% last year.
Also, at Schwab IMPACT, Brock Sutton, head of emerging client capabilities at Capital Group, told InvestmentNews that, while most advisors are using AI, very few are using it to its full capacity.
Recent research from Capital Group points to the shortcomings around AI in the advisor community. Sutton explained that, while 83% of advisors are using AI in their business week over week, only 13% are using the technology for what he describes as “frontier capabilities,” such as automating workflows.
InvestmentNews traveled to Boston, Massachusetts, to cover Schwab's annual conference. All coverage can be found here.
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