The conversation at Future Proof Festival this year wasn't "how should we be thinking about AI?" It was "how does this actually work in practice?" The shift in tone was evident from the first day when Anthropic announced Claude for Financial Advisors – one of nine sessions dedicated to AI adoption.
The advent of AI has brought the industry to a tipping point where clients are expecting a fundamentally different relationship with their advisor. For example, Betterment's 2026 advisor survey found that each successive generation has a higher expectation of monthly communication with their advisor – it's gone from 21% of Boomers up to 83% for Gen Z.
Along with more communications, clients expect a higher level of service as well. For example, Kitces research finds that more than 90% of advisors say they do tax planning — and Spectrem Group finds that 92% of clients expect it. But only 25% of clients say they actually receive it.
It's a gap we've been working to close by making it easier for advisors to access and analyze tax data. To that end, Worthy has had an MCP connection to Claude since spring, and we've been in a design partnership with Edward Jones even longer — working alongside their advisors, compliance teams, and home office specialists to get Worthy ready for the real-world demands of a firm their size.
The Future Proof team asked us to share what we've learned along the way.
The session
Worthy CEO Jonathan Hudacko joined Greg Robinson, Head of Corporate Development at Edward Jones Ventures to share how we worked together to create tax planning software that's truly ready to meet the needs of clients.
Why tax (and why nobody was solving it)
From Worthy's side, the motivation to dive into tax was structural. A client's tax return is the doorway to nearly every meaningful planning conversation: retirement, estate, insurance, charitable giving, legacy. The data for more thoughtful planning is all there. What was missing was a way to make it usable at scale — accurately, compliantly, and in a form advisors would actually trust.
For Edward Jones, the challenge to do more for clients wasn't just about bandwidth. As Greg Robinson put it:
There's a real risk involved in talking about taxes with clients because no one wants to cross the line into tax advice. So the status quo is a gap — a big, expensive, impactful gap — that nobody's been willing to take on.
Build it? Buy it? Co-create it!
There's an unglamorous truth about trying to build tax tools: taxes are messy. Coffee-stained returns, complex family situations, edge cases you can't anticipate with dummy data. So is it better to buy off-the-shelf tax planning software, or to build a tool yourself?
For Edward Jones the answer was neither:
We co-created this with Worthy. That's very different from what most places do. The result is a platform that is accurate, aligns with Edward Jones's compliance requirements, and is auditable so our advisors can check its work.
More than 200 Edward Jones advisors have analyzed more than 100,000 pages of real client tax returns during the pilot — sharing active feedback throughout. Every edge case that surfaced became an improvement that will ultimately benefit other firms that adopt the platform.
We knew we had to meet enterprise-level standards for Worthy to serve anyone in the market well. Starting with the enterprise needs of Edward Jones set a higher bar — but it made everything we did stronger.
Edward Jones Ventures served as the bridge between organizations — pushing internally for speed while holding Worthy to the standard required to build something durable. Greg called it "creative tension we have to continually manage and reset." And that tension is what produced a tool that has a unique combination of flexibility, accuracy, and structured workflows needed to serve clients well.
Two challenges to solve simultaneously
Many tax planning features look pretty similar across different tools. What's different here – and what most tools don't get right – is the result of work Edward Jones and Worthy did to solve the two biggest challenges:
Challenge 1: Data quality
Tax documents are tricky in ways that are hard to anticipate until you're dealing with them at scale. A torn tax return that's photographed in dim light. Incomplete filings. Missing pages. Complex state tax issues involving forms that most tools don't even recognize.
The industry tendency is to either support a handful of common federal forms, or to claim they can handle "everything" (without the accuracy checks to back it up).
Edward Jones couldn't operate without 100% accuracy across all the forms and schedules its clients file. By processing more than $1B in taxable income, Edward Jones (and other design partners) gave us thousands of opportunities to troubleshoot.
As a result, we built Worthy with rigorous accuracy checks that let it ingest over 200 federal and state tax documents – and it validates what it extracts line by line. It's safer and more accurate than OCR ingestion (which is only 98% accurate) and it doesn't ever require privacy-compromising third-party human intervention.
Challenge 2: The need for structure
For a firm like Edward Jones, there's no margin for error with a new vendor – especially one that uses AI. Their team came to Worthy with an extensive list of questions and requirements (which only grew as the pilot went live):
- Who can see what? Advisors, customer service teams, compliance, and IT all had to have different levels of access — and those permissions had to be built in, not bolted on.
- How do you protect sensitive clients? Public figures and high-net-worth clients required private account designations to shield their data (and even their existence) from broader visibility. And there had to be silos within the org to prevent anyone outside a given team from accessing that team's clients.
- How does compliance audit AI-generated analysis? Every output needed to be traceable back to the source document — verifiable, not just summarized.
- How can advisors and investment teams audit accuracy? Worthy had to show its work.
- How do you prevent the tool from crossing into advice? Producing clear, compliance-minded language isn't just a feature — it's a requirement we design every output to facilitate advisor review.
A developer in a bubble simply can't solve these problems. They only surface when you're working with real advisors, real compliance teams, and real edge cases — at scale.
Worthy's data quality and its structured workflows reinforce each other. Better data makes the analysis more trustworthy; structured workflows make that analysis deployable inside a regulated firm. Getting both right — simultaneously, under real conditions — is what the collaboration with Edward Jones made possible.
Other firms may not need all of these features. For example, a three-advisor RIA might not have much use for siloed workflows. But building Worthy for (arguably) the biggest firm meant it would have everything any firm needed – without adding on complexity or implementation hurdles.
What it looks like in practice
Greg Robinson told a story about a financial advisor who was supporting a longtime client who had lost a spouse. The advisor used Worthy to analyze a potential planning approach, quantify possible outcomes, and surface alternatives she might not have considered on her own. It helped the advisor go into a difficult client conversation prepared and confident.
The advisor was the hero. And Worthy made the moment possible.
In the Q&A session, a number of examples and anecdotes emerged about how advisors are using Worthy, why it's effective, and what it's helping them accomplish for clients:
On using Worthy day-to-day
The most common pattern that's emerged: advisors ask clients to send their tax returns in advance. As Jonathan put it: "In a couple minutes of prep, you're able to get a quick idea... and then when the client comes in, you're ready to talk through it." Several advisors are also running the tool live in client meetings.
On tax form accuracy — and why 98% isn't good enough
A competitor recently cited 98% accuracy for the ingestion of tax form data – and old-school OCR software commonly cites 98% accuracy. Jonathan pointed out that 98% sounds great, but at enterprise scale 2,000 errors in 100,000 tax forms means letting a lot of clients down.
Greg was more succinct: "It has to be perfect."
That's why Worthy can handle over 200 tax forms and schedules accurately (and why they didn't hustle to show off an unfinished product at Future Proof Citywide last spring).
On catching what CPAs miss
Does Worthy find mistakes? Yes, but not usually math errors (TurboTax and professional CPA software are robust there). Worthy tends to find omissions. For example, if a client switches CPAs, a $25,000 capital loss carryforward that appears on their 2024 return could quietly disappear unused in their 2025 taxes. In performing multi-year analysis, Worthy frequently catches mistakes like that.
On the CPA relationship
Worthy isn't a CPA replacement — nor a way to offer tax advice – but it does enhance the CPA relationship. For example, September is a terrible time to try to reach your accountant (as K-1s come in and extensions are being filed). Advisors have the opportunity to be a tax sounding board and help clients bring clearer ideas to their accountant.
One CPA firm CEO told Jonathan his firm was able to work more profitably because of the pre-work an advisor did in Worthy. His clients arrived informed, which meant less time explaining basics and more time doing real work.
On who's actually using Worthy
While the Edward Jones team did lots of straightforward planning for fairly typical clients (like analyzing more than 1000 Roth conversion opportunities), one surprise from the pilot was how much advisors liked using Worthy for their biggest clients.
Advisors quickly shifted to analyzing their hardest, most complex, highest-net-worth cases, uploading 80-page returns, multi-state situations, and years of documents. Robinson pointed to story after story of advisors identifying meaningful planning opportunities for clients — and at least a few advisors have made clear they're not willing to give up access to Worthy's insights:
Many of them have threatened bodily harm to us if we were to take this away.
Having Edward Jones as a dedicated design partner totally changed the game for us. Without their participation, it would have been a lot harder to get compliance right, or to build workflows that most advisories actually need — from small features like setting a client to 'private' if they're a public figure, to business-critical features like empowering compliance audits.
Why this matters beyond the session
Anthropic's announcement confirmed what we already believed: the industry has moved from "should we?" to "how should we?" And the hard part isn't re-skinning AI for financial advisors. The hard part is everything around it — the data extraction, the compliance architecture, the structured workflows, the trust.
The client base is shifting in ways that raise the stakes. 92% of clients want tax planning advice from their advisor, yet only 25% say they receive it — and younger clients are less forgiving of that gap. 83% of Gen Z clients expect monthly contact with their advisor, versus 21% of Boomers. The expectation bar is rising from the bottom of the age pyramid up, and advisors who can't deliver proactive, personalized service at scale will feel it. (Spectrem Group, Betterment)
None of what we built came from a product roadmap in isolation. It came from reps — from real advisors, real compliance teams, and real clients who pushed back when something wasn't right. That's what working with Edward Jones produced. And it's what makes what we built together deployable for any firm, not just one that's arguably the largest in the country.