Altruist's Hazel builds AI agent to create financial plans in minutes

Altruist has launched a financial planning agent inside Hazel, its artificial intelligence platform for independent advisors, capable of producing comprehensive, advisor-ready financial plans in a fraction of the time the work has traditionally required.

The agent covers six planning disciplines in a single workflow: retirement planning, investment optimization, cash flow analysis, estate planning, tax strategy, and insurance and risk management.

"Hazel's financial planning agent allows a single advisor to do much of the work that a shop full of specialists would do, in a fraction of the time," said Jason Wenk, founder and chief executive of Altruist, the Santa Monica-based custodian and wealth platform. "We believe this launch will fundamentally shift how advisors operate and how firm owners run their businesses."

The release marks the second major planning capability Altruist has added to Hazel this year, following a tax planning agent that drew significant attention from the RIA custodian market, when it debuted earlier in 2026.

The financial planning agent is designed to give advisors an interactive experience they can run alongside clients in real time. Advisors can model different savings rates, investment strategies, and spending scenarios on the fly, showing clients the downstream impact on their financial picture without switching between systems or preparing a plan in advance.

Hazel assembles each plan by pulling from financial documents, as well as data it captures automatically from client meetings, emails, notes, and other connected sources.

Crucially, Altruist says every figure in the output is produced by dedicated calculation programs rather than generated directly by an AI model; a distinction the company is leaning on as advisors weigh the reliability of AI-generated financial projections.

Data privacy built into the architecture

The financial planning agent operates under the same data governance framework that governs all Hazel features. Altruist has zero data retention agreements in place with its AI model providers, prohibiting them from storing any data belonging to Altruist or its clients. Client data is not used to train AI models and is not shared with third-party providers, the company said.

The race to build a comprehensive AI operating system for advisors has intensified across the wealth management technology sector in 2026, with a growing number of platforms competing to automate the most time-intensive parts of advisory work.

Altruist is positioning Hazel as a broad-based solution rather than a single-use tool, with the financial planning agent joining tax planning as the second pillar of what the company describes as an expanding suite.

Access to the financial planning agent is not restricted to advisors who custody assets with Altruist, a deliberate choice that broadens the potential addressable market for the platform.

Altruist has been expanding the Hazel platform's real-time custodial integration throughout this year, deepening the data connections that underpin the AI's ability to produce current, client-specific outputs.

Additional planning capabilities are expected to follow. The company said the financial planning agent represents the second in a series of expanded solutions planned for the platform. Further details are available at hazel.ai/financial-planning.