10 Ways to Use AI in a Family Office

One of our clients expects staff to use AI on all work before sharing it with the office. Another refuses to use AI at all. Most of our clients sit in the middle. They know that AI can help a thinly staffed office, they want to use it safely, and they aren’t sure where to begin.

AI is a capable assistant, but it isn’t the expert. It can do a wide range of tasks, but someone who knows the family, the assets, and the stakes still needs to interpret the results and decide on next steps. The goal is to increase your office’s capacity, make your staff more efficient, and get important knowledge from people’s heads and into the office’s records. That leaves more time for the family conversations and decisions that tend to get pushed aside when the paperwork piles up. 

Before you get started, agree on a few ground rules. Use a business or enterprise account with model training turned off. Never put Social Security numbers, account numbers, or passwords into a prompt. Some AI notetakers automatically join and record calls, depending on settings, and those transcripts could be requested in a lawsuit. Write a simple AI use policy so the team knows which tools to use, what information they can share, and when to ask for approval.

Here are ten practical places to start.

1. Pull Data from K-1s, Capital Calls, and Statements

K-1s, capital call and distribution notices, bank and brokerage statements, partnership agreements. The paper never stops, even when it arrives as a PDF. Some family offices now use approved enterprise AI tools that read these documents after unnecessary sensitive information has been removed, sort them, and pull out the key dates, amounts and commitments to feed their reporting systems. AI can extract fee terms from partnership agreements and flag potential discrepancies for someone to check against the complete supporting records. Someone in the office still needs to tie the numbers back to the source documents and double-check the results. 

2. Summarize Long Documents

How many 150-page documents does your team actually read cover to cover? Ask your approved enterprise AI tool for a one-page summary of key terms and requirements, with page references and a note of anything unclear or missing. Use it to decide which sections need a full read. Before making a decision, read the language you’re relying on in the original document. Bring legal questions to your attorney.

3. Draft Family Communications and Reports

Give AI the facts and tone you want for quarterly letters, investment committee memos, family meeting agendas, or even your annual family report and you can quickly have a useful first draft. AI can also turn meeting notes into a draft list of decisions, who is responsible, and deadlines. Before anything goes out, have the person responsible review it, cut the generic language, and double-check the numbers. Does it sound like your office? Will it land well with the family? Those are questions AI can’t answer for you.

4. Build Slides and Presentations

Preparing presentations for family meetings, investment committee reviews, board updates, and next-generation education sessions can eat up hours of your week. AI can turn an outline, memo, or spreadsheet into a structured presentation or translate a technical deck into plain language for younger family members. Before presenting, check the data, remove confidential material, and ask how much detail this audience actually needs.

5. Speed up Due Diligence and Modeling

Wealthy families are bombarded with opportunities to invest. Give AI your investment criteria and let it take a first pass at what comes in, compare deals side by side, draft due diligence questions and flag potential deal-breakers early. AI can help clean up Excel files, write formulas, and build or stress-test real estate models. Let the spreadsheet do the math, and check the formulas, assumptions, and results yourself. A comparison can help you decide what to investigate next. It doesn’t tell you whether the claims in the materials are true.

6. Map the Family’s Entities and Estate Plan

Few families have one clear picture of their own structure. AI can read the trusts, LLC agreements, and other entity documents to turn them into a summary and an organizational chart. Make sure the chart distinguishes who owns each entity, who controls it, and who benefits from it. It can be a great starting point for a family meeting or a conversation with the estate attorney, who should confirm the chart before it’s relied upon. 

7. Educate the Next-Gen

AI can build lessons tailored to each family member. That might mean decks, quizzes, and reading materials on investing basics, how a trust works, or a walkthrough of the family’s own entities. It can also create case studies that help family members practice explaining decisions and questioning assumptions. The materials give you a place to start. The most useful learning happens when you sit down together and talk through the questions. Keep the focus on developing judgment and stewardship.

8. Research Tax, Regulatory, and Market Questions

AI research tools can help a staff member get oriented on tax rules, a state residency question, or an unfamiliar asset class quickly, often with links to sources. This can make your conversations with your advisors better informed and more focused, but AI can invent a source or miss a tax implication. Use the research to prepare better questions. Open the linked sources, check their dates, and have your CPA, attorney, or other licensed advisor confirm the answer before you act.

9. Write Policies, Procedures, and the Office Playbook

Many family offices run on one or two people who “just know how things work.” That works well until both of them go on vacation the same week. AI can document an existing process or turn a recorded walkthrough or rough notes into written procedures, checklists, and even a first draft of an employee handbook. Have the person who actually does the work check the procedures, and ask your counsel to review anything with legal or HR implications. If AI is connected to the office’s approved reference materials, staff can also use it to find approved procedures and prior decisions, with links to the current sources.

10. Strengthen Fraud and Cyber Defenses

Family offices are prime targets, and the bad guys are using AI too. Attackers can now produce polished phishing emails and fake audio or video that appears to come from your banker or a family member. Use AI to build realistic phishing drills for staff and family, to review suspicious emails, and to draft your incident response plans. If someone asks you to move money or change payment instructions, call back using contact details already on file and get a second approval where appropriate. Use the office’s established security process for password changes and fraud reports.

Bonus: Guidelines for Safe AI Use

Give family members a one-page guide to safe AI use:

• Turn off model training. Confirm that the tool doesn’t use the family’s information for model training and check the relevant settings and terms.
  
  
• Use an approved enterprise AI tool for anything sensitive.
  
  
• Keep Social Security numbers, passport numbers, account numbers, credit card numbers, and passwords out of prompts. Apply the same care to uploaded files: remove unnecessary personal and financial identifiers, and use tools approved for the information involved. Never upload passwords or authentication secrets.
  
  
• Keep AI agents on a short leash. Require your approval every time an agent spends, signs, moves money, or accepts terms. Give it access only to the email, calendars, or files it actually needs. |
  
  
• Assume voices and videos can be faked. Agree on a call-back routine or code word for any urgent request for money, including one that appears to come from another family member, office, or bank.
  
  
• Verify before you act. AI can be confidently wrong about taxes, legal questions, health and investments. Use it to better prepare questions for your advisors.
  
  
• Treat AI conversations as records. Relevant chats and outputs may be discoverable in court; don’t assume they are privileged.