Mariner runs $35 million tab on AI workforce

InvestmentNews has learned new details on the cost of an AI workforce, as Mariner announced its five-year partnership last week with Humanity Labs to deploy 700 full-time equivalents across the mega-RIA's operations to support advisors.  

Full-time equivalents (FTEs) is a long-standing metric to measure employee labor. Mariner, which advises on more than $630 billion in assets, has contracted at least 700 bots from the AI startup Humanity Labs, with each bot (or AI FTE) costing $50,000 per year. 

“We measure an AI workforce in AI FTEs, and all AI FTEs cost $50,000 a year. And they do the work of, generally speaking, a much more highly compensated human,” Andrei Pop, founder and CEO of Humanity Labs, told InvestmentNews. “In our collaboration with Mariner, 700 [AI FTEs] was the minimum that we agreed was going to be part of our five-year partnership.” 

At Humanity Labs’ $50,000‑per‑AI‑FTE price, a 700 AI FTE workforce equates to roughly $35 million in annual costs. Mariner, which stated earlier this year that it has over 2,000 advisors, will leverage its new AI workforce to complete tasks across client onboarding, account opening, compliance reviews, client reporting, billing, and prospect onboarding. 

“Part of the reason we called the company Humanity Labs is we believe the future of work is human. The future of humanity is human,” said Pop. “We all want to spend more time connecting with one another, not copying data between spreadsheets and systems. And I don't think any advisor or any new grad, any operations person, nobody wants to do that.” 

Mariner’s CEO Marty Bicknell has stated his firm’s goal is to have 5,000 advisors by 2027. Former Osaic executive Dimple Shah, who joined Humanity Labs last month as its managing director of wealth, says an AI workforce will allow RIAs like Mariner to significantly expand the number of clients an advisor can serve.  

“What an AI workforce can do is really accelerate the firm's ability to achieve revenue acceleration goals, margin acceleration goals, and continue to scale at a much faster rate without scaling cost at a linear rate, which is a huge challenge our industry has always had and continues to have,” Shah told InvestmentNews. 

Before starting Humanity Labs last year, Pop was the founder and CEO of Human API, a health data network that was acquired by LexisNexis Risk Solutions in April 2023. Investors in Humanity Labs include Google Ventures and Vestigo Ventures, a firm founded by former LPL Financial CEO Mark Casady. 

“The thing that's hamstrung advisors is they've been confined to the ability to serve 150 to 200 households on average, because the limiting factor is what their teams, the staff, and the back offices can support in service of providing a great relationship experience and that intimacy to their clients,” said Shah.  

“You remove that bottleneck and that capacity by saying the back office is no longer the constraint. How much more now can a firm grow in terms of bringing on new clients, providing a better service experience, expanding the opportunity set with the clients they serve, tapping into the next generation of clients within those families,” added Shah. 

In a press release with Humanity Labs, Marty Bicknell stated that as Mariner’s “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.”  

Humanity Labs says its partnered wealth management firms oversee more than $750 billion in assets, indicating that Mariner represents a large majority of those assets. While robo-advisor RIA startups like Range have committed to using AI to replace human advisors, Pop envisions the AI workforce from Humanity Labs having the opposite effect on firms it works with. 

“I look at it as you have a capability that is so transformational to all of the work that your humans don't want to do, so that your humans can focus on the stuff that only humans can do — judgment, taste, relationships, connecting with humans. The true work of an advisor, and that's what we're going to see more of,” said Pop.