From automation to agents, how wealth management cut a quarter of its staff while retaining their knowledge

In the halls of the Al-Iqtisadiyah newspaper forum in Riyadh, Abdul-Mohsen Al-Umaran, founder and CEO of The Family Office, went beyond theoretical promises to present the financial sector with a clear, direct operating bill: reducing his company's workforce by 25 percent while accelerating the pace of operations, and leaning toward eliminating a similar share next year. The firm, whose portfolios focus on alternative investments and private markets, manages assets of about $2.3 billion across offices in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait. What Al-Umaran disclosed, drawing on his prior experience at international banks such as Goldman Sachs, reflects a decisive shift for financial institutions in the region; technology has moved from software-testing spaces to the core of structural decisions and hiring schedules.

The fundamental shift Al-Umaran emphasized lies in the subtle difference between ordinary automation and the deployment of artificial-intelligence agents. Traditional automation was limited to repeating linear workflows, whereas agents coordinate complex databases and execute actions with precision and speed that exceed routine human intervention. This approach is embodied in the launch of the integrated assistant “Wealth Mermaid” within the company’s app, a system that gives portfolio clients immediate access in Arabic and English to analyses of their exposure to private equity, private debt and real estate, as well as monitoring risk metrics and progress toward investment goals via voice and text commands, reducing the execution time of some transactions from full days to a few seconds.

In our analytical reading of the numbers, we see that safeguarding knowledge assets constitutes the true core of this strategic shift.In wealth-management and private-market environments, the movement of experts to competitors represents a severe loss of investment memory and relationship confidentiality. According to Al-Umaran, assigning tasks to AI agents allowed expertise to shift from information hoarded in the minds of specific individuals to documented, institutional knowledge owned by the system, remaining operational and serving the client with the same quality even after the employee leaves their position, turning the algorithm into a secure repository that preserves efficiency from erosion.

This reality forces investment managers in the Gulf and Egypt to urgently review their operating plans, especially given Al-Umaran’s warning that 50 percent of wealth-management firms worldwide may merge or disappear entirely within the next seven years if they fail to deliver the same level of efficiency. Regional family offices will not have room to rely on slow manual reports; a client who experiences portfolio management in Arabic within seconds will not accept a return to old waiting cycles. The demand profile for young talent in the region’s markets is also shifting: data-gathering and spreadsheet-preparation roles are receding in favor of skills in managing smart agents, reviewing their outputs and steering complex investment decisions.

Although the firm, which lists 50 investment experts, bets on long-term returns from its technology investments, the practical outcome confirms that operational savings are being realized early.The message that emerged from Riyadh is clear to anyone managing capital in the region: the gap in adopting smart agents does not stop at technological differentiation, but draws the line between staying in the market and exiting it.