Artificial Intelligence: It’s one of the biggest buzzwords in the world, and it’s transforming the way we work across all kinds of industries. But how is this technology making its presence felt in the world of trust and estate administration right now?
In this blog post, we’ll take a look at what AI can do, how it can benefit your law practice, and why it’s no substitute for a real human being.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is a technology that enables computers to perform certain tasks that previously required human intervention. This includes summarizing text, identifying objects in images, and translating language. AI systems work by identifying patterns in vast amounts of data and using them to predict outcomes.
While AI systems can’t replace human beings, they can certainly help to eliminate some of the manual, repetitive work that prevents human beings performing at their best. Here’s how AI powered tools are helping to streamline estate administration for trust and estate professionals.
One of the key areas where AI can help is document automation, picking up the heavy lifting of drafting legal letters, contracts and other documents so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time. AI tools learn as they go, so you can train them to understand specific terms relating to estate administration for faster and more accurate results.
Does your law firm spend huge amounts of valuable time inputting information? Do you find yourself entering the same information several times over in order to fit different templates? This is where AI driven solutions can help slash administration time. Document parsers are able to analyze data across a variety of formats and layouts including emails, PDFs and even scanned images, and to extract the information you need quickly and easily. As a result, data only has to be entered once, reducing the risk of human error.
Accounting is a key element of estate administration. Executors need to stay on top of bank accounts and investments in order to calculate the overall value of the estate, as well as produce mandatory reports for beneficiaries and a final accounting for the court.
Before AI came along, fiduciaries spent hours analyzing bank statements and invoices in order to find the relevant information. Now, AI systems make it easy to extract financial transactions from bank and brokerage statements so that you can fill out templated forms and generate financial reports at the click of a button.
One of the major benefits of AI is that it can analyze huge amounts of data very quickly, cross-checking for errors along the way. It’s like a proofreader that never gets tired, picking up all the small inconsistencies that a human being might miss. As a result, using an AI driven system saves hours of manual work inputting data or combing through mountains of paperwork searching for the tiny error that threw a spanner in the works.
Artificial intelligence is on your side when it comes to compliance. As well as improving accuracy, these systems are able to check documents for conflicts and track changes in regulations in order to keep you on the right side of the law. It’s important to note, however, that your law practice must be compliant in the way you use AI, for example, with regard to data privacy laws.
The impact of AI is clear: by reducing the amount of time spent on repetitive tasks, AI enhances productivity. It paves the way for law firms to take on more work or dedicate more focus toward client relationships and business development initiatives that will grow a business. This is a huge net positive.
With these benefits in consideration, along with the vast potential of AI, it’s important to remember the limitations of technology. AI can’t comfort a grieving widow or guide her through the estate administration process with any degree of sensitivity. There’s no algorithm that can teach an AI system how to manage complex family dynamics after someone dies or factor in the nuances that make affect the way an individual matter is handled. There is unique value in the role of humans, especially when it comes to emotional matters like the death of a family member.
However, by streamlining the routine work associated with estate administration, AI frees up attorneys to better support their clients. These tools are here to help professionals deliver exceptional service with a human touch—not to replace them.
Ready to boost efficiency in your practice with the help of AI systems? Estateably is an industry-leading platform designed to streamline administration for trust and estate professionals. Our online tools include powerful accounting, task management, document automation, instant report generation, and data extraction using DocuVision, our AI document parser.
Book a free demo to see our tools in action and start harnessing this new technology to turbocharge your practice—and empower the human beings at its heart.