Altruist has launched artificial intelligence-powered tax planning within Hazel, its AI platform, enabling advisors to create personalized tax strategies by analyzing clients’ 1040s, pay stubs, account statements and other financial documents.
The feature, which is now available to any advisory firm regardless of custody arrangements, represents the first in a series of expanded planning solutions for the platform (As a standalone product, Hazel AI is available for $60 per seat per month).
The tax planning capability is meant to take completed client tax returns and convert them into client-ready strategies without manual data entry, applying Altruist’s proprietary tax logic to interpret financial documents, meeting notes, emails, and custodial and CRM data.
“I imagine an advisor on the phone with a client, and right after the conversation, you get documents from the client, and Hazel can take them, drop them in, and soon thereafter, you have this interactive dashboard to begin realizing the household’s tax plan,” said Gokul Ramanathan, Altruist’s Hazel product manager.
“We wanted to begin here because it is such a value add for both the advisor and client,” he said, referring to the specialized tax-related tool that had been built over the last few months.
Altruist is careful to point out that Hazel is providing tax analysis and insights, not tax advice, which remains the advisor’s responsibility.
Nonetheless, with the new tax planning feature, Hazel is delivering interactive scenario modeling, allowing advisors to explore “what-if” questions such as the impact of bonuses, home sales, retirement transitions or family lifestyle changes with real-time projected tax outcomes.
Advisors can export reports created by Hazel or walk clients through findings live, which can provide another touch point for engaging with clients.
The platform operates under zero-data-retention agreements with AI model providers, prohibiting them from retaining customer data or using it for AI model training.
Hazel operates on the same secure infrastructure as Altruist, which the company noted is already safeguarding billions of dollars in client assets (though not how many billions).
“Tax planning is one of the most powerful ways advisors can improve outcomes, but it’s also slow and mentally draining, especially in the busy tax season,” wrote Jason Wenk, founder and chief executive officer of Altruist, in a prepared statement.
Altruist rolled out Hazel’s ability to provide real-time account data access to advisors in November, allowing the technology to answer questions about everything from balances and other account data to beneficiary or household information and holdings.
Those real-time features were in addition to Hazel’s ability to answer questions based on data pulled from an advisor’s CRM, documents, emails and meeting notes, which Altruist announced in September.
Hazel’s origins are based on the AI-powered productivity platform Thyme, which Altruist acquired in June. The company promptly rebranded it as Hazel and initiated the customization process to create an AI assistant tailored for the firm’s independent advisors and end clients.
While Hazel has been in use for only a few months, Ramanathan was still able to discuss the technology’s current top five use cases among advisors, the most common being its use in drafting client communications. This was followed by tax planning queries, financial plan analysis, investment analysis and the fifth simply being questions to Hazel about what it can or cannot do, he said.
Asked about Hazel’s underlying artificial intelligence, Ramanathan said that the company was not relying on any single technology but customized everything based on what worked best for a given purpose or project.
“Fundamentally, we are not locked into a certain large language model; we marry the subject matter expertise with the best AI architecture,” he said.
“We are very differentiated for wealth management,” Ramanathan said, noting that the differentiation requires a lot of original thinking and customization with very little that can be used off-the-shelf.
In addition to Hazel, Altruist also announced a rebrand in June and rolled out its own internally built cash management platform in December 2024.
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