As of 13 August 2026, AI cannot act as an executor of a will.

What to actually do

1. Hand it to a person

   The route this page recommends

   Someone with a licence or accountable authority has to sign this before it counts.

2. Use a tool built for this

   Second choice

3. Do it yourself

   The distant third

   A chat interface gets you a draft, but you cannot verify it yourself. That is the catch.

   How to actually do it

   1. Open the will, death certificate, recent bank and investment statements, property records, insurance papers, pension correspondence, loan and credit statements, and relevant GOV.UK pages, then make copies for your working file.
   2. Paste the non-sensitive contents and a redacted list of documents into the prompt, including the deceased person's UK nation, known assets, debts, beneficiaries and any missing or disputed information.
   3. Ask the chatbot to produce the estate-administration checklist, separating confirmed facts, assumptions, open questions and matters requiring a solicitor or official process.
   4. Use the checklist to contact banks, insurers, pension providers, creditors and HMRC, recording each response, reference, balance and requested document in an estate log.
   5. Open the relevant GOV.UK probate and inheritance tax guidance and compare every proposed official step and deadline against the current page before taking action.
   6. Send the will, estate log, correspondence and the chatbot's flagged questions to a solicitor where the will is unclear or disputed, the estate is complex, tax may be due, or you are unsure whether an action is lawful.

   Prompt

   I am an executor of a will in England and Wales or Northern Ireland, and I want administrative help rather than legal advice. Using only the information and documents I provide, create a clear estate-administration checklist covering: locating and reading the will, recording assets and debts, identifying organisations to contact, preserving records, possible probate steps, and questions to take to a solicitor or the relevant GOV.UK service. Separate facts from assumptions. Do not decide who inherits, interpret an unclear or disputed clause, calculate inheritance tax, confirm that probate is or is not needed, approve payments, or tell me that a distribution is legally safe. Flag every missing document, uncertainty and issue requiring a solicitor, HMRC or another official process. Draft only neutral letters or emails that I can check before sending. Do not invent names, dates, values, account details or legal rules. State clearly that this is not professional advice.

   Open it prefilled in ChatGPT or Claude, or copy it into Gemini, which takes no prefill link.