Mariner Wealth is paying to take back-office work off its advisors. The firm, which advises on more than $630 billion in assets with more than 2,000 advisors, contracted a minimum of 700 AI full-time equivalents from Humanity Labs on a five-year term, according to InvestmentNews. Humanity Labs CEO Andrei Pop told the paper each one costs $50,000 a year.
The contract covers client onboarding, account opening, compliance reviews, client reporting, billing, and prospect onboarding. InvestmentNews puts the bill at roughly $35 million a year, its own arithmetic from the 700 minimum, not a disclosed contract total. Mariner is buying advisor time that used to go to paperwork.
Time AI frees up isn’t revenue until the firm sells something with it.
What Mariner is buying
Humanity Labs sells the full-time equivalents as capacity. Advisors have been “confined to the ability to serve 150 to 200 households on average,” Humanity Labs managing director Dimple Shah told InvestmentNews, “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.”
Shah’s pitch names two uses for that time. A firm can bring on new clients. It can also expand “the opportunity set with the clients they serve” and reach “the next generation of clients within those families.” Pop says each full-time equivalent does “the work of, generally speaking, a much more highly compensated human.” That’s the vendor describing its own product.
Mariner CEO Marty Bicknell said in a press release that as the AI workforce takes on more of “the work beneath the work,” his people can “spend more time building relationships, establishing trust, delivering thoughtful advice and helping clients navigate life’s biggest financial decisions,” according to InvestmentNews. The same piece reported his goal of 5,000 advisors by 2027. Nothing reported about the deal changes what Mariner sells or what its clients pay.
Why the big firms spend the time on more households
Bicknell talks about more time on advice. The fee math points the other way. When a firm charges a percentage of the assets it manages, an extra hour with a family it already serves earns the same fee as before. A new household brings new assets, and new assets bring new fees. A firm turns that time into revenue fastest when it takes on more households.
Wealth Management reported in July 2026 that Envestnet pledged in 2025 to spend $1 billion on technology, that Savant Wealth Management has committed $50 million over three years to build an in-house AI operating system, and that J.P. Morgan spent roughly $2 billion on AI last year, by David DeVoe’s estimate. DeVoe, founder and CEO of DeVoe & Company, said the largest firms are “investing eight figures annually in technology and AI, while many independent advisors are still tinkering with tools like ChatGPT.”
The race a smaller firm can’t win
A 20- or 50-advisor firm gets time back too, from one tool at a time. J.D. Power’s annual financial advisor survey found 42% of advisors at independent broker-dealers and RIAs used AI tools, up from 19% the year before, according to Wealth Management. Captive advisors at wirehouses and banks were at 73% in that J.D. Power survey, up from 44%. DeVoe & Company surveyed 100 RIAs with $100 million or more in assets: 59% describe their approach as “the experimentation phase,” and 20% have a firmwide AI strategy actively being implemented. DeVoe expects AI “will make it easier for smaller firms to run their business,” though he also expects it to push more advisors toward selling their firms.
What a smaller firm can’t do is win the household race. If it puts the time into new households, it competes against Mariner, Savant and the other large firms spending eight figures or more a year on technology. And once every large firm can carry more households, carrying more stops setting anyone apart.
Something new for the families already on the book
The other use Shah named is the one a smaller firm can own. Its advisors already know the families on the book, and they often know who in each family will inherit. Advisors can spend that time on a service those families don’t buy today, priced on its own instead of folded into the asset fee.
Some partners will say the extra hour still pays, because a family that sees more of the advisor brings more assets, or refers another household. That still runs through the same asset fee. A larger account or a referred family pays the way a new household does, by adding assets. The time becomes a new line only when the family pays for something the asset fee doesn’t already cover.
Take an advisor at a 20-advisor firm who gets back a day a week from onboarding paperwork and quarterly reporting. Spent on the existing book under the same fee, that day buys a nicer experience and no new revenue. Spent on a defined service, it can be a first plan for each client’s adult children, a family meeting that walks the heirs through the estate, or a yearly review that brings the next generation to the table. Each has a scope, a family it’s for, and a price.
The large firms will turn their hours into households. A firm that can’t match them on volume still decides what its own hours become. Before those hours disappear into a slightly bigger book, the partners can name one thing the families they already serve would pay for, and put a price on it.