Humanity Labs, an artificial intelligence company backed by venture firms including Google Ventures and Vestigo Ventures, aims to change the way work gets done. It just won a big client in the wealth management space.

National financial services firm Mariner recently announced a five-year agreement with Humanity Labs to use an AI model that promises to do the work of more than 700 full-time employees. This partnership is the largest AI workforce implementation in the registered investment advisor industry to date, the companies say.

The AI workers won't replace human advisors, says Dimple Shah, managing director, wealth, at Humanity Labs, in a recent interview with Barron's Advisor. Instead they will coordinate multistep processes, like onboarding clients, preparing for meetings, or looking for prospects, using the systems Mariner already has in place.

The program is set to learn along the way, becoming more efficient over time, Humanity Labs says. "As work is completed, the AI Workforce captures every action in a shared memory layer, continuously building Mariner Organizational General Intelligence $(OGI)$, a proprietary operational intelligence that becomes more valuable over time," the companies say.

Marty Bicknell, CEO and president of Mariner, says the partnership stands to change the industry's basic model for growth. "Just about every firm in our industry has grown the same way: serve more clients, hire more people," he says. "That model has a ceiling, and we decided to break it."

Rather than replace advisors, the model will expand the capacity of the entire organization, says Shah. "An AI workforce model is a coordinated system of labor that delivers done work," she says. "The power of what an AI workforce offers versus singular agents is actually doing that coordination work."

While most AI tools aim to make individual employees more productive, the goal here is to make the company more productive, says Shah. "Let the humans focus on relationship development and engagement, judgment and decision-making," she says.

Her advice for advisors: "Focus on being a trusted partner to your clients. Let the AI workforce consume the operational machine work that goes on in the back and middle office."

Evolving industry. Artificial intelligence has already been heavily integrated into the wealth management industry, according to a Schwab Advisor Services study.

According to the report, 63% of RIAs are using AI tools in some capacity. Despite this trend, many advisors remain in the experimental phase of using AI. The report suggests that 71% of AI usage is primarily fixated on administrative tasks like email drafting and note-taking.

An increasingly automated workforce raises concerns about the potential for rising unemployment in the future. Fifty-two percent of workers in the U.S. are worried about the impact of AI in the workplace and 32% think it will lead to fewer job opportunities, according to a survey from Pew Research Center.

Founder and CEO of Humanity Labs Andrei Pop held a recent "Ask Me Anything" webinar where he addressed fears regarding the role of AI in the workforce. He suggested that Humanity Labs' business model will result in new, better jobs for humans, not replacement.

"Humans become the managers of that AI workforce and they become capable of doing the work that is human that an AI workforce can't and won't ever do," he said.

Shah echoed that perspective in her interview with Barron's Advisor: "At the end of the day, our mission is to elevate the role of humans in human-centric firms," she says. "Let machines do the machine work, let humans do the human work," says Shah.