Spending $35 Million on AI Agent Workforce
Wealth management firm, Mariner, is deploying 700 AI agents while planning to more than double its adviser ranks.
Hey, I’m Matt. I’m a former Bloomberg News reporter, and you’re reading AI Street, where I report on how Wall Street uses AI.
This is one of the bigger bets I’ve seen a wealth management firm make on AI agents, or software that can carry out work across multiple systems rather than simply answer questions.
Mariner, which advises on about $630 billion, is paying $35 million a year to deploy at least 700 AI agents across its operations under a five-year partnership with Humanity Labs, according to Investment News. The AI systems will handle tasks including client onboarding, account opening, compliance reviews, reporting and billing.
At first glance, this may sound like Mariner is looking to downsize. But the firm is actually expanding, with plans to grow its adviser headcount from more than 2,000 earlier this year to 5,000 by 2027.
Regular readers know I’m skeptical that AI is coming for everyone’s jobs. Mariner’s approach reflects the more nuanced reality suggested by the data: AI may change what people do without necessarily eliminating their jobs.
As I’ve written before, some of the best AI use cases are also the most tedious. Back office tasks like client onboarding and compliance reviews are necessary but they’re hardly the service an investor is really seeking from their financial advisor.
Mariner plans to divide work between employees and AI. Human advisors will remain responsible for client relationships, judgment and outcomes, while AI handles repetitive tasks such as paperwork at scale. People don’t hire a financial advisor to fill out paperwork. They hire one for judgment, trust and advice.
That division of labor gets at one of the biggest organizational challenges posed by enterprise AI: deciding where people add the most value and where software can take over. That requires mapping how work actually gets done across the firm, one tedious workflow at a time.
OffDeal, which calls itself an AI-native investment bank, is an example of what that process looks like in practice. The Wall Street Journal recently published some details on AI-native investment bank OffDeal, where software engineers shadowed bankers from 8:30 a.m. until midnight for two weeks, documenting every step of their day. The exercise led the firm to automate pre-call preparation and post-call debriefs, eliminate unnecessary reports and shift some work to different teams.
This is a tedious process, but companies will likely reap more rewards than just adding a simple AI chatbot.
Bridgewater Tests Whether AI Actually Learned
Specialized training can improve an AI model. But it’s a challenge to determine whether a model really “learned” a new task or is relying on its memory.
Bridgewater’s AI team trained a strong model to be good at a particular task, then transferred its skill into a tiny package, small enough to show it couldn’t just be memorizing the training answers. That allowed the researchers to put a mathematical floor on how well the improved model should perform on new, similar questions drawn from the same distribution.
They tested the method on math, coding, general knowledge and text-to-SQL. Across all four areas, the calculated minimum performance exceeded the original model’s accuracy and came within 6% to 11% of the trained model’s performance.
Bridgewater formed AIA Labs in 2023 to build AI systems for investing. Late last month, the hedge fund said a specialized model trained with Thinking Machines outperformed GPT, Claude and Gemini at identifying useful information in financial documents.
Hedge Funds Chase AI Talent in San Francisco
Citadel, Point72 and Balyasny are among the firms building a presence and recruiting engineers in the city, where they increasingly compete with AI labs for technical talent. Financial News reports that Balyasny and Freestone Grove have hired engineers from Amazon and Google, although the story provides no hiring totals or details about the models the firms are developing. Financial News
BofA Names Global Markets AI chief
The bank named Kevin Milsom head of platforms AI transformation and moved Amy Avery’s analytics and modeling team into the global platforms group. The reorganization gives AI a defined owner inside the markets division. Reuters
Fasanara Hires Man Group Exec For AI lab
James Hylands will lead a new lab that plans to develop proprietary systems for underwriting, portfolio optimization, risk monitoring, market intelligence and operational automation. Those are planned applications, with no deployments or results disclosed yet. Alternative Fund Insight
ROUNDUP
What Else I’m Reading
There’s a new way to land an internship at Millennium: be an AI superstar | Business Insider
Bloomberg’s Last Stand | The Terminalist
AI Agents Could Boost Crypto | Franklin Templeton
Google Study Says AI Is Helping Workers, Not Replacing Them | WSJ
This Week in AI Street
Building AI Inside BlackRock
BlackRock is best known as the world’s largest asset manager, overseeing more than $15 trillion. But CEO Larry Fink casts the company as part money manager, part global technology company. Its Aladdin-led technology-services and subscription business generated about $2 billion in revenue last year, nearly as much as Cloudflare.
ICYMI
Investors managing billions in assets read AI Street.
Paid subscribers access original reporting, data analysis, and interviews with the executives and researchers leading Wall Street’s AI buildout.
Substack Live: AI on Wall Street
I’m going to try my first Substack Live on July 29 at 10 a.m. ET with Arman Khaledian, a former Millennium quant and the founder of Zanista AI, which uses AI to turn financial news into trading signals.
We’ll chat about the state of AI on Wall Street and take questions from subscribers on the state of AI in investing. If it goes well, I’ll do more of these.
You can follow along here.
SPONSORSHIPS
Reach Wall Street’s AI Decision-Makers
AI Street reaches institutional investors, C-suite executives and Big Law attorneys at firms including JPMorgan, Citadel, BlackRock, Skadden, McKinsey, and more. Sponsorships are reserved for companies in AI, markets, and finance. Email sponsors@ai-street.co for more details.
CALENDAR
Upcoming AI + Finance Conferences
Artificial Intelligence for Financial Services – July 23–24 • Cambridge, MA
MIT executive-education workshop on AI/ML applications in financial services, emphasizing strategy, use cases, and implementation considerations.
fintech_devcon – August 3–5 • Denver
Developer-focused fintech conference for people building financial products and infrastructure, with technical sessions, demos and networking.FinLLM@IJCAI 2026 – August 15 • Bremen
Symposium on large language models for financial services, bringing together researchers and practitioners.AI for Eco and Finance Summer School & Conference – August 24–28 • Turin
Summer school and conference on applying machine learning to economics and finance.FinovateFall 2026 – September 9–11 • New York
Fintech showcase built around product demos, bank and fintech executives, and financial-services technology.Eagle Alpha Alternative Data Conference – September 10 • New York
Alternative-data gathering for investment and research teams, data providers and vendors.
Thanks for reading!
I’m always happy to receive comments, questions, and feedback.
Connect with me on LinkedIn, or
Send an email to matt [at] ai-street.co