Mariner has signed a five-year agreement to embed more than 700 AI full-time equivalents across its operations, betting that the move will let the national advisory firm expand capacity without following the industry's usual playbook of adding headcount for every new client relationship.
The deal with Humanity Labs, which it says is the largest of its kind for an RIA to date, will see Mariner move beyond deploying AI as a productivity add-on for individual staff, by creating an embedded team that works inside Mariner's existing systems alongside its associates.
The AI workforce will take on high-volume operational tasks in the back office before extending into middle and front office functions.
Work assigned to it spans client onboarding, account opening, compliance reviews, client reporting, billing, prospect onboarding and identifying cross-serve opportunities. Every completed task feeds into what Mariner calls its Organizational General Intelligence, a shared memory layer meant to sharpen the firm's processes as it accumulates more institutional data over time.
Mariner COO and chief strategy officer Cheryl Bicknell said the shift is intended to protect and grow staff roles rather than displace them.
"This partnership is a commitment to our people," she said. "The future of our firm depends on helping our associates spend more time doing the work only people can do. By moving work to the AI Workforce, we're creating more opportunities for our teams to build relationships, solve complex problems and deliver the thoughtful guidance our clients expect. As our firm grows, we're committed to ensuring our people grow with it, and every associate will have a clear path to the new opportunities this creates. The workforce does the work. Our people make every client interaction more meaningful."
Mariner CEO and president Marty Bicknell framed the new partnership as a deliberate break from how advisory firms have traditionally scaled.
"Just about every firm in our industry has grown the same way: serve more clients, hire more people," said Bicknell. "That model has a ceiling, and we decided to break it. For more than 20 years, Mariner has been guided by a simple belief: put clients first and positively impact the lives of many. This is the next evolution of that commitment. This is about giving our advisors and associates more capacity to do what they do best: serve clients. As the AI Workforce takes on more of the work beneath the work, our people can spend more time building relationships, establishing trust, delivering thoughtful advice and helping clients navigate life's biggest financial decisions."
Mariner plans to split its operating structure into what it calls an experience layer, where associates retain ownership of client relationships, judgment and outcomes, and an execution layer, where the AI workforce absorbs repeatable tasks at scale.
The firm is rolling out the change firmwide through associate briefings, newly published career paths, and roles built specifically around directing and quality-checking the AI workforce's output.
Humanity Labs founder and CEO Andrei Pop said the partnership reflects a shift beyond how most firms currently use AI tools.
"Most organizations today are using AI to make individual employees more productive," said Pop. "Mariner is taking the next step by leveraging an AI Workforce that expands the capacity of the entire organization. That's the difference between adding another tool and fundamentally rethinking how work gets done. We believe every major professional services firm will eventually have an AI Workforce working alongside its people, and Mariner is helping define what that future looks like."
The Humanity Labs partnership extends a pattern of strong technology adoption at Mariner.
As InvestmentNews reported last year, the firm struck a partnership with estate planning platform Vanilla that gave more than 700 advisors access to its digital tools, part of a push tied to Mariner's stated goal of growing its advisor headcount to over 5,000 by 2027. That earlier deal came months after Mariner received a strategic minority investment from Neuberger Berman, capital the firm said would support its growth targets.
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