Alaris CEO Allen Darby bets AI will cut RIA sale valuations

Allen Darby, founder and CEO of Alaris Acquisitions, now bets AI compresses RIA sale valuations more than it lifts them, he told InvestmentNews. A year earlier, he told the publication that AI-driven staff cuts could raise RIA valuations as automation absorbed clerical work.

Darby said the average advisor supports somewhere between 80 and 120 clients today. Once AI is fully built into these businesses, he expects that figure to rise to 200 client relationships per advisor in his example, "with no impact to client service." The mechanism runs through staffing ratios. Fatter margins, in theory, mean richer multiples.

The catch is who pays. Buyers are the ones investing in AI, not sellers, whose typical setup he described as "maybe have a Claude instance or ChatGPT." Buyer spending, he said, runs to tens of millions of dollars.

A buyer running 200 households per advisor looking at a seller running 100 sees an overstaffed firm, Darby said. It will price in the cost of fixing that ratio, which he estimated at two to three years of operating less profitably than the buyer does now. "How will that express itself? Well, I can see it's going to express itself in a lower valuation," he said.

Orion's 2026 Advisor Wealthtech Survey of 571 advisors suggests few sellers sit near that buyer-side comparison. In the survey, 73% of advisory firms use AI in some capacity, 6% run agentic workflows and 5% have integrated AI across their systems.

Alaris uses AI on its own side of the table. Its Lens platform, launched in February 2025, profiles more than 80 buyers and narrows each sale to a shortlist of three to five firms based on compatibility. Darby does not expect it to move prices. "It is just going to facilitate the matchmaking," he said.

Darby presents the AI question as unresolved. He can argue it either way, he said, and calls it the topic everyone in the industry, Alaris included, is trying to figure out. If a buyer underwrites a seller at the buyer's post-integration ratio, the buyer's own AI spending becomes a discount lever rather than a margin the seller gets paid for.

Client-per-advisor ratios already get read as operating evidence in this market. This publication has argued the same way about AI for advisors: the value accrues to whoever owns the connector and the governed client record.