Guest: Andrei Pop, Founder and CEO of Humanity Labs.
In a nutshell: What happens when AI formally joins the workforce?
I’ve been thinking through this using a framework I call FTE: Friction, Time, and Energy.
AI has the power to eliminate the Friction of routine work, thereby freeing up more Time for staff and advisors.
But Energy is still finite.
Going forward, I think the most successful firms will be the ones who most efficiently deploy their energy to strengthen client relationships and deliver empathetic wealth advice.
On today’s show, Andrei Pop and I discuss how AI is transforming wealth management and how Humanity Labs is working with firms to shape the future of our industry.
.Andrei Pop and I discuss:
- How Humanity Labs is partnering with Mariner Wealth Advisors to scale an AI Workforce to more than 700 full-time equivalents.
- Using AI to remove the “machine work” from team members’ plates so that they have more time and energy to focus on the human experience.
- Why AI will (likely) never replace the premium value of human empathy, judgment, and trust.
- How to train new financial advisors when AI can do the traditional entry-level work that helped trainees get up to speed.
- The potential for an AI “economic surplus” and how to allocate those gains throughout society.
Andrei Pop on what an AI workforce leaves for the human advisor:
“Knowing what to ask and what ‘good’ looks like is a skill. Connecting with the human to establish that trust is a skill. The reason that services have gotten more expensive over the last 60 years is you had to throw bodies at it to achieve scale. That’s the constraint that an AI workforce has the opportunity to remove.
“If you think about this fundamental product of trust, what is trust? Did you do the work right? Can I count on that? And are you on my side? The first part of that question, I think AI can scale. Are you on my side as a human being? That’s a relational question between two humans. So I think what is left is the human-to-human experience. And my view on that is we will pay a premium for that as humans for a very, very long time. It’s never been the work. The most important thing has always been the human relationship. It’s just been buried underneath a whole bunch of other stuff that is necessary, but is not sufficient for establishing the trust.”
Andrei Pop on reviving the apprenticeship model:
“I don’t believe that the best way to learn the craft of advice is to sit in the back office while your boss or boss’s boss is out meeting with a client. The best way to learn it is actually to ride shotgun with that individual and learn and see and observe and understand what works and what doesn’t. As a case in point, if you look at the best senior advisors that are mentoring and bringing other folks along, what do they spend their days on? It’s reading emails and meetings and understanding what the more junior advisors are doing and helping provide coaching on that. That actually tells you where is the value learning and transferring occurring: it’s in the human-to-human connection and in the human-to-human interaction.
“If I imagine what the future model of educating in any job will look like, it will be much closer to an apprenticeship model, which can actually scale incredibly well if you connect that human-to-human side. And it scales in a way that is much more personal.”
Andrei Pop on AI and identity:
“I think the hardest problem that we have to contend with is this problem of identity. The problem of human identity and where we derive our identity and meaning from always shifts as a result of technology. And I think that’s maybe the scariest part of this for folks.
“We hire a lot of software engineers at Humanity Labs, and even in the twelve months that we’ve been scaling, I’ve had some very fascinating internal conversations with folks where you can see their sense of self, their sense of identity, shifting over time. Where they go, ‘Well, if an AI workforce can write all of the code that it used to take me six months to write in six hours, what does that mean for me?’ The answer is: it was never about the code to begin with. The code was a byproduct of your imagination, your taste, your judgment, the things that made you good at what you did in the first place.”
