What Is Tukios Up To? The Quiet Shift From Website Provider to AI Juggernaut in Deathcare

If you haven’t been paying close attention to Tukios lately, you should be. Because while the rest of the deathcare profession has been busy debating whether to update their Facebook page or finally ditch their clip art homepage, Tukios has been quietly – and I mean quietly –  building something that looks a lot less like a software company and a lot more like the AI backbone of the entire funeral profession.

And most people haven’t even noticed yet. I know I’ve been sleeping on what’s happening. But I just woke up. 

Let’s Start at the Beginning

Tukios didn’t arrive with fanfare. They showed up years ago with a simple but powerful idea: automate the tribute video. At the time, tribute videos were a manual, time-consuming grind for funeral homes. Tukios fixed that. They built software that made the process fast, polished, and accessible to any funeral director regardless of technical skill. It worked. It spread. They became, and remain, the largest tribute video software application in the deathcare profession.

That alone would have been enough for most companies. Plant the flag, collect the subscriptions, call it a day.

Tukios didn’t call it a day.

Then Came the Websites

In 2021, Tukios launched funeral home websites. Not a side project. Not a beta feature buried in a menu. A full platform. And they moved fast. Today, they are the largest provider of funeral home websites in the United States. Read that again. The largest. In four years. That’s not a slow build, that’s a land grab executed with precision.

But here’s what’s interesting. The website isn’t the product. The website is the foundation. It’s the nucleus around which everything else they’re building orbits. And what they’re building around it is where this story gets genuinely remarkable.

The Shift Nobody’s Talking About

Tukios is no longer just a SaaS website provider. I’m not sure they ever really were. What they’re becoming – what they arguably already are – is an AI company embedded inside the deathcare profession. Wild to think about. 

Look at the product suite they’ve assembled. There’s an AI obituary writer that helps funeral directors produce meaningful, well-written tributes without staring at a blank screen at midnight. There’s guestbook moderation powered by AI, keeping the comment sections of online memorials free from spam and inappropriate content without a human having to babysit it. There’s service information extraction, automatic photo rotation, summaries, and a growing list of tools that handle the invisible friction points that eat up a funeral director’s day.

And then there’s the new stuff. That’s where it gets really wild.

The AI Photo Engine

Tukios recently launched an AI Photo Engine built specifically for funeral professionals. Directors can type simple conversational instructions; “colorize this photo,” “remove the background,” “adjust the lighting”, and the AI handles the rest. No technical editing skills required. No outside services. No waiting.

Think about what that actually means in practice. A family hands over a decades old black and white photo, slightly blurry, bad lighting, maybe a distracting background. In the past, that photo either went into the tribute as-is or the funeral home paid someone to clean it up and waited. Now? A director types what they want, and within seconds, the deceased looks their best for their final tribute. That’s not a small thing. That’s a profound thing, dressed up in a simple UI.

The AI Music Maker

This one stopped me cold when I saw it. Tukios just launched an AI Music Maker that lets funeral directors generate completely original, copyright free songs for tribute videos. Any genre – gospel, acoustic folk, traditional hymns, you name it. Directors can write custom lyrics, type in memories and key moments from a person’s life, and let the AI draft the song around them.

They essentially built a beat laboratory for funeral homes. And that sentence should sound as wild as it is, because it is wild, and it works.

Copyright free. Original. Personalized. Built right into the platform.

Every funeral home that uses this isn’t just adding background music. They’re ensuring that every note and every lyric helps tell the unique story of the life being honored. That’s the framing Tukios is using, and they’re right. This isn’t a gimmick. It’s a genuine solution to a real problem funeral homes have dealt with forever: music licensing, generic stock tracks, families asking for songs that can’t legally be used in a video. Solved. Next.

The Philosophy Behind the Build

Here’s what separates Tukios: they’re not building technology for technology’s sake. They’re not walking into funeral homes and saying, “You need to digitally transform.” They are watching where funeral directors struggle, identifying the friction, and building something that quietly makes it disappear.

Their AI Suite is designed to give hours back to funeral directors, automating the most time-consuming tasks while ensuring every memorial is polished, professional, and deeply personal. That’s the whole philosophy in one sentence. Not “disrupt the profession.” Not “revolutionize your workflow.” Just, here’s your time back. Go be with families.

That restraint is intentional. And it’s smart. The funeral profession is not an early adopter culture. It’s a relationship driven, trust first, show me before I believe you profession. It seems like Tukios gets that. They don’t force adoption. They build tools so useful, so frictionless, so obviously valuable that funeral homes just… start using them. And then they can’t imagine going back.

The Ecosystem Play

What it feels like Tukios is really building – whether they say it out loud or not – is an ecosystem. The website is the hub. The AI Suite, Memorial Pro obituary management, eCommerce through Tuk-eComm, event management, payment portals, crowdfunding, online arrangement tools, free lead generation – it all plugs into the same platform. Every new tool makes the platform stickier. Every problem they solve makes it harder to leave. Every funeral home that adopts one product is one step closer to adopting five.

This is what Amazon did with third-party sellers. What Apple did with the App Store. Build the foundation, expand the ecosystem, make leaving feel impossible because leaving means giving up too much.

Tukios is doing that. Quietly. In funeral homes across America.

The Bold Prediction

Here’s where I land on this: Tukios is not building a better website company. They are building the operating system for the modern funeral home. And within the next few years, I believe you will see them move into territory that makes everything they’ve done so far look like the warm-up act.

We’re talking AI that can draft entire arrangement conversations. Predictive tools that help funeral homes anticipate family needs before they’re even voiced. Integrations so deep into case management, marketing, and aftercare that switching away from Tukios becomes practically unthinkable.

The funeral profession has a habit of sleeping on technology until it’s too late to catch up. The funeral homes paying attention to what Tukios is building right now – not next year, right now – are the ones who are going to look very smart very soon.

Everyone else is going to wake up one day and wonder how they got so far behind.

Watch Tukios. Because it doesn’t look like they are slowing down.

Ryan Thogmartin is the CEO of DISRUPT Media and founder of ConnectingDirectors.com, the funeral profession’s leading online publication.