According to a new report from MIT, 95% of enterprise GenAI pilots fail to scale. Wealth.com’s Ester® has defied the odds and is proving what success can look like for purpose-built AI in financial services. With 30,000+ documents processed in the last year, an 800% YoY growth spike in jobs completed, Ester shows that when AI is built for workflows, compliance, and measurable ROI, adoption follows.
The Enterprise AI Divide is Real
A new report from MIT’s NANDA initiative, covered by Fortune on August 18, 2025, reveals a stark reality: 95% of enterprise generative AI pilots fail to deliver meaningful revenue impact. Only about 5% of promising AI pilot programs achieve rapid revenue acceleration, while the vast majority stall out despite a flood of new AI products and features entering the market.
After analyzing 300 public AI deployments, MIT researchers found a sharp divide between success stories and failed experiments. Importantly, the issue isn’t the quality of the models themselves. Instead, the report highlights a persistent “learning gap” inside enterprises: AI that isn’t embedded into workflows, budgets that over-index on sales and marketing instead of back-office automation, and fragmented adoption strategies that never scale.
For financial services, the challenge is even more acute. Compliance, auditability, and operational accuracy are non-negotiable. Generic chatbots may offer flexibility for individuals, but they can’t support enterprise-grade adoption where regulators demand transparency and firms require consistency. Firms need tools that learn from the work, fit the work, and can be documented for regulators.
As the report notes: “Generic tools like ChatGPT excel for individuals because of their flexibility, but they stall in enterprise use since they don’t learn from or adapt to workflows.” — The GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business 2025 (MIT via Fortune, 8/18/25)
How Ester Solves the Enterprise AI Adoption Gap
Most AI pilots fail because they aren’t built for enterprise workflows. Ester is different. It was designed from the ground up for estate planning and real advisor use cases, which is why it’s gaining adoption across leading broker-dealers, RIAs, and custodians.
Where generic tools fall short, Ester succeeds because it’s:
- Workflow-native: Embedded directly into the advisor experience, Ester makes it easy to upload estate documents, extract key details like trust terms, appointments, and assets, and produce a structured summary in seconds. This isn’t an add-on chatbot. It’s built into the way advisors already work.
- Compliance-first: Every output is explainable, audit-ready, and securely contained. Information uploaded to Ester is treated like data in a vault: it will never be reused, reshared, or exposed to outside models.
- Deeply integrated: Beyond summaries, Ester generates clear visualizations of complex estate structures, making it easier for clients to understand roles, outcomes, and amendments. It also supports real-time Q&A, helping advisors clarify terms and explore scenarios.
- Purpose-built for financial services: Ester isn’t a wrapper on someone else’s LLM. It’s Wealth.com’s in-house AI, trained and tuned on the unique patterns, compliance requirements, and disclosure rigor that define financial services.
MIT’s research reinforces this approach: enterprises succeed more often when they partner with specialized vendors rather than trying to build generic tools internally. Internal AI builds succeed only one-third as often as building a partnership. Ester is proof of that principle. Firms don’t need to experiment with fragile DIY builds. They can adopt a domain-built, enterprise-ready AI that is already scaling in production.
Proof Points: Ester’s Measurable Impact
Ester’s growth is not theoretical. It’s measurable, repeatable, and happening inside enterprise workflows today. While most generative AI pilots never make it past the proof-of-concept stage, Ester is scaling across broker-dealers and RIAs with adoption metrics that speak for themselves.
- 30,000+ documents processed all time (as of September 2025).
- Sept 8–14: ~800% year-over-year growth compared to the same week in 2024.
- Power users: Our top three most active enterprise customers each used Ester 100+ times in a single month, a signal of daily reliance, not experimentation.
What advisors are using Ester for
The most frequent workload? Revocable trusts with supporting documents, including amendments. This is important: advisors are turning to Ester for complex, high-stakes reviews, not trivial tasks. That trust signals Ester’s role as a workflow engine, not a novelty tool.
And it’s not just the numbers. Advisors themselves are validating the impact.
Danny McAuliffe, President of Brookstone Capital Management, explains how his firm uses Ester to simplify complex estate plans:
“Wealth.com’s AI extraction tool is one of the most useful features that we’ve come across so far. We’ve plugged some pretty complex estate plans in there, and it is really good. You can get an Ester summary in two to three minutes, and get a report that breaks a very complex estate plan down into a summary that is actually useful for clients to understand.”
Taken together, the usage growth and advisor feedback make one thing clear: Ester isn’t a pilot or a “chat layer.” It’s a workflow engine for estate planning designed to learn from document patterns, standardize advisor output, and deliver consistent attorney-grade documents at scale. It’s an enterprise-grade solution, already embedded in production workflows, delivering measurable ROI across financial services.
What Financial Advisory Firms Can Learn
The MIT research is clear: enterprises succeed more often when they select specialized partners rather than trying to build their own generic tools. Ester’s success reinforces this. For financial institutions, the lessons are straightforward:
- Choose domain-built AI. Generic chatbots weren’t designed for regulated industries and high-stakes work. Industry-specific models and tooling outperform because they’re designed with compliance, policy, and disclosure requirements in mind. Wealth.com’s Ester is purpose-built for estate planning and wealth management, with compliance and policy rigor baked in.
- Start where ROI is measurable. The fastest wins come from automating back-office and review workflows, not flashy front-of-house demos. That’s where Ester has proven to cut time, reduce exceptions, and create measurable efficiencies.
- Empower managers and advisors. Adoption scales when the people closest to the work can use AI directly in their day-to-day workflows. Ester is designed to fit seamlessly into those processes.
- Make compliance foundational. Auditability, controls, and data safeguards aren’t optional. Compliance and security are foundational for AI to scale in financial services. With Ester, everything is secure.
- Measure business impact, not hype. Real results come from metrics like jobs completed, documents processed, and reduced rework, not vanity stats. Ester’s enterprise adoption is proof of that.
The takeaway is clear: enterprises succeed when they partner with specialized platforms like Wealth.com, not when they attempt to reinvent AI in-house. Ester combines a powerful AI model with deep workflow integration and compliance alignment, delivering the kind of measurable ROI that generic tools can’t.
Where Estate Planning AI is Headed
Ester has already proven it can scale where most generative AI projects stall. But we’re only getting started. The next chapter of Ester includes:
- Agentic capabilities that will automate multi-step advisor workflows end-to-end, saving even more time on complex estate planning tasks.
- Deeper integrations across custodial platforms, CRMs, and document management systems—embedding Ester even further into the advisor tech stack.
- Broader document coverage beyond trusts and supporting documents, with richer cross-document reasoning that gives advisors a full-picture view of every client’s estate plan.
- Expanded governance controls for supervisory review, evidence capture, and regulatory alignment, ensuring compliance remains a core strength as usage grows.
Ester isn’t an experiment. It’s a proven, enterprise-grade AI platform that financial institutions are already using at scale to achieve measurable ROI. Where 95% of AI pilots fail, Ester is the counterexample, delivering results today while building for the future.
If you’re a broker-dealer, RIA, or enterprise ready to move past pilots and see real outcomes, now is the time to act.
👉 See Ester in action. We’ll map Ester to your current review workflows and show you benchmarks for time savings, quality improvements, and compliance alignment.
Sources
- MIT NANDA, The GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business 2025, summarized by Fortune, Aug 18, 2025 (Sheryl Estrada).
- Wealth.com internal product analytics, Sept 2025 (usage and adoption figures cited above).
