Since we announced Tern Pro last week, I've heard variations of the same question from advisors: what actually happens to my client data when I use AI?
There's a lot of AI being built right now that treats your data as the product. Free tools that learn from your inputs. Platforms that monetize what you share. The business model is obvious once you see it. If you're not paying for the intelligence, something else is.
Tern was built on a different premise. Your client relationships are yours. The trust your clients place in you is not something we'll ever treat as an asset to extract value from. That's not a feature. It's a founding principle.
Here's what that means in practice, and where we're taking it.
Tern's Agentic AI was built to protect you on both. Tern has contracts in place with its AI providers that prohibit your data from being used to train their models. You benefit from your ecosystem having full context about your business in a system that prioritizes protecting your data.
Tern protects your data, while free AI uses it to pay the bills.
When you use a free general agentic AI tool like ChatGPT or Gemini, your inputs may be used to improve the model for everyone. As the saying goes, if you're not paying for the product, you and your data is the product.
We decided early that Tern would never work that way. Your data is protected by strong privacy-focused agreements with our providers.
Tern's Agentic AI works with the full context of your business.
Last week an advisor used Tern's Agentic AI to audit multiple trips, draft personalized follow-up emails to every client on those trips, and handle a full week of follow-up work. That session saved her roughly ten hours.
That's possible because Tern's Agentic AI sees your business the way you do. It knows your full book, your client history, your trip details, and your communication style. That depth is what makes it genuinely useful rather than just fast. A generic AI tool can answer a question. This one can run a process.
And because it works inside Tern, you're not copying client details into a chat window. When the session ends, your data stays inside Tern. Our AI model providers process requests but never retain or train on your data. That is a contractual commitment, full stop.
Your data is not for sale. That's not a policy. It's a principle.
Advisors have always won by knowing their clients better than anyone else. Those relationships, that trust, that history, they belong to you. Tern will never compromise them.
I was talking with a large tour operator recently and they mentioned something that stuck with me. What makes their brand unique is that even on 4 and 5 star tours, they use public transportation. They want travelers to feel like locals and understand how the city actually works.
That's exactly the kind of detail an advisor needs the moment a client says "I want to go somewhere and feel like a local." It's also exactly the kind of thing that gets lost after a trade show conversation and forgotten by the time it's relevant.
That's the problem we're building toward solving. Suppliers will be able to load that kind of context directly into Tern so it's there when you need it.
And here's what matters: when your agent goes looking for the right fit for a client, it finds that detail on your behalf. The supplier never sees your client's information. They never query it. They never know a match was even considered. The search is always initiated by you.
As we keep building, you'll see us invest in 2 directions. Better tools for you and your agents to capture and use the context that makes your business sharp. And better ways for suppliers and agency owners to load what makes them unique. Both will always work the same way.
We believe you shouldn't have to choose between AI that's genuinely useful and AI that protects your clients. Your client relationships are not an asset we monetize. They're the thing we're here to protect.
That's the company we're building.
We're showing everything it can do at our June 10 webinar. Register here.