What the Funeral Connections Report Says Families Are Really Protecting
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Every year, research like this surfaces and funeral professionals scan the headlines: affordability gaps, technology adoption rates, preneed numbers.
But the Funeral Connections Report 2026 — produced by Fortitude Research and commissioned by Passare, a Funeral Directors Life company — deserves a closer read than most. Because buried across six chapters of data is a thread that runs through nearly every finding, quietly connecting them all.
Families protect the gathering.
When asked what they would cut if they needed to reduce costs, families said the same thing: flowers first. The casket upgrade. The reception spread. What they don't cut — what they consistently protect — is the service itself. The coming together. The being in the same room with the people who loved the same person.
That isn't sentimentality. It's signal.
What "protect the gathering" actually means
The report surveyed 2,542 families and 794 funeral professionals across six areas of the funeral experience. In the section on service value, a finding stands out that's easy to scroll past: 45% of families say they would have spent more if they had better understood the value of what was being offered.
Not 5%. Not 15%. Nearly half.
Which raises a question worth sitting with. If families are willing to spend more — and they're already protecting the gathering above nearly everything else — what are they spending it for?
The answer the data keeps circling: they want the gathering to mean something. They want to share memories, celebrate the person they lost, feel that the time spent in that room was worthy of the life being honoured. The report notes that "sharing memories and celebrating their life" ranks among the top things families value about a viewing or service.
The gathering works when it celebrates who someone really was.
What they may be quietly asking for
There's something the report points toward without quite naming it.
If families protect the gathering. If they value the sharing of memories above almost everything else. If they'd spend more for value they could touch and feel — then somewhere underneath all of that data is a quieter question: can someone help us say this right?
Ask anyone who's been to a funeral what they remember most, and nearly everyone says the same thing: the eulogy. Not the flowers, not the reception. The eulogy — because that's where the stories were. The moment where they learned something they never knew about the person they thought they knew so well. The detail that made them laugh through tears, or quietly nod, or wish they'd said something sooner.
The eulogy is the centerpiece of the gathering. It's the moment everyone in the room will carry with them. And it's the one piece of the entire service that falls entirely on a family that is grieving, exhausted, and working against a hard deadline.
Most of them struggle. Some quietly give up.
AI is already in the room — but it's working on the wrong document
The Fortitude Research data shows that 43% of funeral firms already use AI in some capacity. Of those, 90% use it for obituary writing or editing.
Nearly half of funeral homes have already made peace with AI as a professional tool. The question has quietly shifted from whether to use it, to where.
But here's what's worth understanding about how the most thoughtful AI tools work in this space: sometimes AI has very little to do with the process.
With TreulogyAI Families spend the better part of an hour answering guided questions — about who their person was, how they laughed, what they said when things got hard, the small habits nobody outside the family would know. They're not filling out a form. They're remembering. The prompts are designed to surface the specific, particular, irreplaceable details that make a tribute feel true.
By the time families finish answering, the work is mostly done. They've written the eulogy — they just haven't assembled it yet. The AI shapes what they gave it. Nothing is invented. Nothing is assumed. No gaps are filled with language that could describe anyone.
The one concern worth taking seriously
The report is candid about what holds firms back from AI: 55% cite concern that it feels impersonal. That's the right concern. The stories that have circulated in the profession this past year — AI generating content that bears no resemblance to the person it describes — are real, and they come from tools that were never built for this space.
But impersonal AI and family-authored AI are different things entirely.
When a daughter spends an hour answering questions about her father's laugh, his terrible puns, the way he always burned the toast and made it anyway — and the output reflects those exact stories back to her in a way she couldn't have written herself — that isn't impersonal. That's the opposite of impersonal.
The concern is valid. The answer is in choosing tools that work the way grief actually works: stories first, structure second.
What the value gap is actually pointing to
Funeral professionals know intuitively that families would pay more for value they can understand. The report confirms it with data. But the question worth sitting with is: what does that value look like when a family can touch and feel it?
A eulogy a family is proud of. A speaker who was quietly terrified until they read the first draft and thought — that's him. That's exactly him. A tribute that gets shared with family members who couldn't be there, that gets saved, that gets reread years later.
These aren't abstract outcomes. They're the moments that determine whether a family recommends the funeral home that served them. They're the moments that make a funeral professional feel, at the end of a long week, that the work mattered.
And right now, most funeral homes have no repeatable way to help families get there.
The gap worth closing
The Funeral Connections Report names six gaps between what families want and what the profession currently delivers. The eulogy sits quietly across all of them.
It's where the gathering either lands or doesn't. It's where families feel — or don't feel — that the service was worth protecting. It's where the 45% who would have spent more either find the value they were looking for, or leave quietly wondering what was missing.
TreulogyAI was built for this gap. Not adapted from a general AI tool. Built specifically for grief, for families, for the funeral profession — because the stories families carry into the worst week of their lives deserve more than a blank page and a deadline.
If you're curious what it looks like in practice, we're offering funeral homes a free first month through October 31.
→ Request access at treulogy.com/pages/nfda-free-trial
The Funeral Connections Report 2026 was produced by Fortitude Research and commissioned by Passare, a Funeral Directors Life company. Data cited reflects findings from 2,542 family respondents and 794 funeral professionals surveyed across the United States.
