AI will make the biggest companies bigger and the smallest more powerful. Hotels show who gets squeezed

In 1988, eight people squeezed into a single room in New York to start an investment firm around an unusual premise: data and technology could give investors a clearer view of risk.

That firm became BlackRock. Its Aladdin system grew from an internal risk tool into a platform connecting portfolio construction, trading, operations and accounting. BlackRock ended 2025 with $14 trillion under management after attracting $698 billion of net inflows in a single year.

The revealing number, though, is eight.

Today the average SEC-registered investment adviser focused on individual clients also employs eight people and manages $424 million. Small advisers are not disappearing. Their number reached a record 16,544 in 2025, and more than two-thirds manage less than $1 billion.

The giant became vastly larger, while the boutique became easier to build.

The pressure is landing between them. DeVoe & Company counted 322 wealth management transactions in 2025, a record, up from 272 the year before. The more telling detail is who was buying. The industry had 18% more sellers but 19% fewer buyers than the prior year, and first-time buyers accounted for just 8% of deals, the lowest share on record. Acquisitions are concentrating into a shrinking set of private equity-backed platforms.

This is what a technology barbell looks like. The largest platforms spread their data, expertise and infrastructure across more volume. Small specialists rent capabilities they could never afford to build. Firms in the middle carry enough overhead to need scale but lack enough scale to fund a differentiated platform.

Artificial intelligence is likely to accelerate that pattern across the service economy.

The debate about AI often asks whether it will concentrate power or democratize it. Both can be true, because scale never made coordination easy. It made coordination affordable. 

Only a large company could spread the fixed costs of a revenue management team, a 24-hour service center and an enterprise technology stack across enough volume, and coordinating it all was a tax that made large organizations slow. AI cuts that drag for the largest companies and removes the affordability........

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