What Is an AI Family Office?

An AI family office is software that does for you what a traditional family office does for the ultra-wealthy: it sees every account you own (brokerages, retirement, crypto), researches with the data professionals use, coordinates decisions at the level of your whole net worth rather than one account, and executes what you approve, while your own brokerages keep custody of the assets. It is the layer above your accounts that acts only in your interest.

Traditional family offices manage the affairs of single families, and the cost of running one, typically $1 million or more per year in staff alone, is why they have historically required tens of millions in assets. The AI version collapses that cost to a subscription. Tengu, the AI for investing, is building exactly this: today it works across 25+ brokerages, from Robinhood and Schwab to Coinbase; the family-office functions, cross-account tax-loss harvesting first, are the roadmap.

Three things converged in 2025 and 2026. First, brokerage connectivity matured: aggregation rails plus direct integrations made it possible for one piece of software to hold read-and-trade permissions across dozens of brokers. Second, AI reasoning crossed the threshold where a model can research a portfolio with citations rather than vibes. Third, the brokers themselves shipped agent interfaces (Robinhood's Agentic Trading in May 2026, Public's Agentic Brokerage in March, Coinbase's agent trading in June), proving demand for AI that acts on money.

But every broker-native agent shares one ceiling: it can only see and act inside that broker. A family office is, by definition, the thing above the accounts. That vantage, independent, cross-account, loyal to you alone, is what the term AI family office names. No single broker can occupy it for you.

The relationship between the middle and right columns is a ladder, not a contest: an AI portfolio manager is the working core of an AI family office. Tengu ships the portfolio manager today and is building toward the full office.

Five jobs, each one impossible for an app that sees a single account:

• Whole-picture monitoring: one view and one AI across every brokerage, retirement, and crypto account you own, instead of five apps that each see a fragment.
• Professional-grade research, cited: filings, fundamentals, options flow, insider and congressional activity, answered in plain language with sources you can check.
• Cross-account coordination: the moves that require seeing everything at once, rebalancing across brokers, avoiding doubled-up risk, and harvesting tax losses in one account against gains in another, which no single-broker tool can do.
• Supervised execution: the trades you approve route through your own brokers, with position-size limits, leverage caps, and drawdown circuit breakers on every order.
• Strategy delegation: subscribe once to a mandate (a politician-tracking strategy, a 13F mirror) and the office executes it within guardrails.

Anyone with more than one account and less than a family-office fortune, which is nearly everyone who invests. The traditional threshold for a single-family office is roughly $100 million in assets; the staff costs alone exclude the other 99.9% of investors. The point of the AI version is that the threshold disappears: the same always-on attention, research depth, and cross-account coordination, at software prices (Tengu starts free; Plus is $15/month and Pro is $39/month). The wealthiest families never needed better apps. They needed, and had, a team. Software finally makes the team copyable.