Mariner Partners With Humanity Labs for AI Workforce

Mariner Partners With Humanity Labs for AI Workforce The $630 billion RIA is deploying Humanity Labs' AI workforce across operations in a five-year deal, marking a shift from experimentation to production. Mariner, the Overland Park, Kan.-based national registered investment advisor that manages more than $630 billion in client assets, has entered a five-year partnership with technology provider Humanity Labs to scale an artificial intelligence workforce representing more than 700 full-time equivalents across its operations. Humanity Labs founder and CEO Andrei Pop describes his company and its technology as a managed service that provides an AI workforce, sitting on top of the advisor’s existing ecosystem of tools and infrastructure. That workforce is meant to function as an embedded digital team operating, in this case, within Mariner’s existing systems and workflows, handling operational work across back, middle and front office functions, including client onboarding, account opening, compliance reviews, client reporting, billing and prospect onboarding, according to the company. Financial terms of the partnership were not disclosed. “Just about every firm in our industry has grown the same way: serve more clients, hire more people,” said Marty Bicknell, chief executive officer and president of Mariner. “That model has a ceiling, and we decided to break it.” The partnership positions Mariner as the first wealth management firm to adopt the AI workforce model at enterprise scale, reflecting a shift from AI experimentation to production use cases embedded into core operations. In theory, the AI workforce captures every action in a shared memory layer, building what the firm calls Mariner Organizational General Intelligence, a proprietary operational intelligence that learns from every interaction. “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,” said Cheryl Bicknell, chief operating officer and chief strategy officer of Mariner. In a previously unpublished February interview, Humanity Lab’s Pop said that much of what has come to market thus far in terms of agentic AI can be broken down two tiers: AI-native software operated by the advisor who ultimately still remains the bottleneck in terms of productivity, and AI agent builders deploying custom agents inside of firms, which are more sophisticated and closer being “truly agentic.” “The problem in the latter is that the firm still owns the operation and management of those agents day-to-day, and then you have the managed digital workforce, where the RIA doesn’t buy a tool or hire someone to build agents,” said Pop. “They get teams that deliver completed work where the firm’s workflow doesn’t change—they get outcomes, not software,” he said.