When I applied for my first credit card, I had no idea what my credit score was. I avoided checking because, the conventional wisdom went, that would have only hurt my score. Yet in just a few short years, consequence-free credit score tracking became standard across the financial services industry, so much so that nearly one quarter of Americans check their credit score each week. The financial planning tools consumers have access to have developed rapidly. Credit score monitoring, net worth aggregators, budgeting, and goal-setting have moved from simple calculators offered by a few banks and brokerages to a baseline consumer expectation.
It isn’t just banks getting in on the action. Today, firms are competing with dedicated financial planning tool providers like Rocket Money and instituting advanced features like Chase’s automatic subscription cancellation to match them. Now, newly introduced AI-powered tools are bringing new and advanced capabilities, and higher consumer expectations.
Major banks and brokerages may not yet have detailed consumer-facing AI-powered planning tools, but for the 55% of U.S. consumers who already use AI for financial planning, even the tools that were cutting-edge 18 months ago may not be enough. The numbers are even more dramatic for millennials and Gen Z at 72% and 77%, respectively, two groups soon to find themselves on the receiving end of the Great Wealth Transfer between now and 2048. Millions of consumers are on the verge of life-altering, or at least balance sheet-altering, windfalls. Who will they turn to for help managing it?
Incumbent firms have already invested a lot in their planning tools, and the results have been impressive, particularly around goal forecasting. Brokerages like Fidelity and Empower provide impressive forecasting capabilities, allowing clients to see their chances of success based on their current financial position. However, these tools rely on time-consuming inputs and can be cumbersome to interact with as well as confusing for less financially literate users. Clients must set goals or make manual adjustments to model assumptions. As fintechs begin to integrate AI into their planning tools, they are removing this friction, allowing clients to view bespoke charts and graphs and forecasts and receive plain-language feedback based on their conversations with AI-powered chatbots.
Origin, a dedicated financial planning platform, offers some of the most advanced AI-powered advice we’ve seen. Its forecasting tools allow clients to model major life events, from buying a home to having a child, and see the projected impact on their long-term finances. The platform’s AI assistant answers open-ended money questions and delivers tailored recaps of markets and account activity. Clients can ask follow-up questions or muse about how their finances might fare under any circumstance, real or imagined. In particular, its AI tools stand out for their ability to create detailed graphics and chart views within the chat window to illustrate responses to client inquiries.
Origin is not the only firm to integrate planning tools and AI assistants. Fintechs like Mezzi provide many of the same planning tools found on sites across the industry, such as net worth and goal planning. However, Mezzi enhances these offerings by providing links to AI-powered breakdowns that provide detail beyond the charts and graphs and allowing clients to respond to firm analyses with their own questions.
Monarch offers another example of a planning platform putting AI at the center of the experience. The firm introduced a revamped AI Assistant in its early 2026 release that clients can ask about spending patterns, cash flow and net worth. Like Origin, the assistant responds by drawing data from their account. Elsewhere within the platform, AI-powered insights explain what changed and why directly on the client’s dashboard, and a Weekly Recap widget delivers an automatic rundown of the week’s finances. This sort of basic, accessible, and conversational planning information may be much more helpful to consumers put off by the detailed, jargon-heavy dashboards that many traditional financial services firms provide.
Focused specifically on retirement planning, Boldin provides cutting-edge planning tools that exceed anything currently offered by incumbent banks and brokerages, and with AI-integration to boot. The site provides detailed retirement recommendations to clients including strategies on claiming Social Security, Roth conversions and dozens of graphs, charts and other visualizations to display clients’ financial prospects well into retirement. Additionally, early this year Boldin introduced a beta version of Ask Boldin AI, a chatbot that interacts with each of the firm’s tools and uses them to inform its responses. Like the other chatbots tested, it will refuse to make individual position-level investment recommendations. However, Ask Boldin AI is more than happy to provide detailed advice and guidance to clients asking detailed questions about their planning and retirement.
AI chatbots may be particularly helpful to clients not only for their ability to directly answer questions about jargon and data, but also for their ability to fill gaps in existing planning tools. Inheritance and windfall planning tools are still in their infancy across the industry, yet AI chatbots at firms like Boldin are able to work around these constraints, directing users toward the most effective way to model inheritance within available tools. They can also provide personalized feedback to questions that the firm’s visual tools themselves may be unable to answer
The financial planning tools offered across the financial services industry have come a long way since their infancy. Yet the introduction of generative AI means that these tools will soon yet again lag behind a new suite of industry leaders. AI offers consumers a degree of personalization and dialogue that legacy tools cannot match, and that consumers will come to expect from every digital experience.
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Alex Tiro
Alex Tiro is a senior analyst on CI's projects team.