48% of Americans have made no arrangements for their digital accounts after death — including email, photos, and social media — even among people who already have a will. That figure comes from the Trust & Will 2026 Estate Planning Report, a survey of 5,000 U.S. adults conducted in January and February 2026, and it is the clearest signal yet that traditional estate planning has a missing layer.

The same report found that 56% of Americans have no estate plan of any kind, and that will ownership actually dropped from 31% to 26% in a single year. The documents are getting rarer. The digital footprint is getting larger. And the gap between what people leave behind and what their families can actually access is widening every year.

What Estate Planning Has Always Missed

A will transfers assets. It does not transfer love.

It can direct who inherits the house, the savings account, and the jewelry. It cannot tell your daughter why you were proud of her, in your own voice, on the morning of her wedding. It cannot deliver a birthday message to a grandchild born after you are gone. It cannot explain, in the quiet and unhurried way that only a recorded message allows, what you want your family to know when the grief is still raw.

That is the gap that AI-powered voice and video legacy messages are now filling — and the market has noticed. Mordor Intelligence sizes the digital legacy market at $23 billion in 2025, growing to $47 billion by 2031 at a 13.7% compound annual growth rate. Estate attorneys and wealth advisors are now describing AI voice legacy as a new estate planning frontier, with clients using pre-recorded voice and video for birthday greetings, marriage advice, and expressions of love that no will could ever contain.

Why AI Voice Trust Is Rising Fast

Consumer trust in AI for estate planning jumped from 20% to 30% in a single year — and among Gen Z, 46% already trust AI to help them plan end-of-life arrangements (Trust & Will, 2026). Washington state enacted digital likeness protection law effective June 2026, adding regulatory structure to a category that is moving from early adopter to mainstream faster than most people realize.

This is not a niche technology trend. It is the next logical step in what it means to care for the people you love.

What Eterna Legacy Does

Eterna Legacy is built around one idea: Presence Insurance™. You record voice messages, video messages, and written notes inside a secure digital vault. You designate heirs. An alive-check system monitors your activity quietly in the background. If you pass away, your messages are delivered to the people you chose — automatically, privately, at the moment they need them most.

The platform supports every message type that matters: a general note, a farewell, instructions for the family, a birthday message set to arrive years from now, an anniversary note for a spouse. The messages are yours. The words are yours. The voice is yours.

Eterna Legacy handles the rest.

The 48% Problem Has a Direct Answer

If 48% of Americans — including people who already have a will — have made no arrangements for their digital presence after death, the solution is not a longer checklist. It is a single decision: record what you want your family to hear, store it somewhere safe, and make sure it reaches them.

That is exactly what Eterna Legacy was built to do.

Trust in AI for this category is rising. The regulatory environment is catching up. The market is growing at 13.7% a year. But none of that matters as much as the simple human fact underneath the statistics: the people you love will grieve, and the sound of your voice — recorded today, delivered when it matters most — is something no legal document can replace.

FAQ

What is a digital legacy platform? A digital legacy platform stores voice, video, and written messages from a person and delivers them to designated family members after the person passes away. Eterna Legacy is a digital legacy platform built around this idea, which it calls Presence Insurance™.

Are AI voice and video legacy messages part of estate planning? Yes. Estate attorneys now describe AI-powered voice and video legacy as the fastest-growing gap in traditional estate planning — the layer that handles emotional and digital inheritance, not just financial assets.

How does Eterna Legacy deliver messages after death? Eterna Legacy uses an alive-check system that monitors user activity. If a user passes away, the platform automatically delivers their stored messages to the heirs they designated during setup.

Start your vault today →