Most advisors I talk to could grow. A lot of them choose not to because it felt like the only option to grow was to hire.
The reasons are real. Hiring is hard. Posting a role, sorting applicants, interviewing strangers, hoping you picked right, and knowing you might have to let someone go if you didn't. That is a lot to take on when what you actually want is to do great work for your clients. Plenty of advisors look at that next step and decide it is not worth it. "I am good where I am" is a completely legitimate answer.
Now combine that with all the invisible work that has quietly held advisors back for years. The administrative grind that fills your day without ever moving your business forward. Between the work you do not want to hire for and the work that never seems to end, a ceiling forms over every advisor who lands there.
We have unusual data on why.
What advisors need, and what nobody wants to do
A while back we acquired Lucia, a marketplace where advisors post jobs and copilots apply to do them. We looked closely at the work flowing through it, and the pattern was stark.
The single largest category of work advisors post is building out itineraries. Moving trips from Travefy or Axus into Tern, or creating them from scratch. 586 of the jobs we analyzed, the biggest category by far. It is also the work copilots want least. 89% of those posts got zero applicants.
Now look at what copilots do apply to. Canva and design jobs draw more than 4 times the interest. Branding, social, creative work of every kind. The reason is obvious once you see it. Nobody wants to spend days copying and pasting itinerary details from one system into another. Not the advisor, and not the person the advisor would hire to do it.
So the work you most need done is the work the market least wants to do. And that is before you have written the job post or sat through a single interview, which advisors tell us is one of the biggest things that stops them in the first place.
You end up stuck. The work is boring, the people you would hire avoid it, and getting to the point of hiring is its own wall.
This is exactly the work AI should do
The copy, the paste, the migration, the moving of a trip from Travefy or Axus into Tern. An AI does not mind any of it. It does not get bored, it does not get tired, and it does not apply only to the fun jobs. We have already seen this with our Chrome extension, which advisors use to pull entire itineraries into Tern without retyping a thing. It has become one of the most-used things we have ever shipped, for exactly this reason.
The flip side matters just as much. The creative work, the design, the judgment, the moment you anticipate something a client did not think to ask for. That is where people thrive. It is the same reason copilots reach for the Canva jobs, and the same reason great advisors will keep winning. Let the machine do the boring part. Keep the part that is actually yours.
Tern’s Agentic AI is the hire
This is what we built. Tern’s Agentic AI reads your email and updates Tern for you. It can bulk update activities, draft client communications, and keep your trips current, all automatically. You log in, glance at the work, and approve it in seconds. It runs around the clock. No onboarding, no mentorship, no performance review, no risk of losing someone you spent months training. It is the hire you were never going to make.
I am not going to try to cover everything it can do here. We are walking through all of it on our June 10 webinar, and I think what you will find is that it unlocks an incredible amount of value. Register here.
There is still a real place for a human assistant in this industry, especially for creative and relationship work. We are not pretending an agent does everything a person does. But the monotonous, repetitive work that has been the wall for so many advisors? That part is handled.
What Tern Pro costs
Tern Pro gives you Tern AI at scale, allowing Tern’s AI to complete even more tasks on your behalf. To enable that scale, Tern Pro has additional cost and flexibility to decide how much usage you want.
You might ask how this compares to ChatGPT or Claude. Tern AI uses the same kind of intelligence. It can answer the same questions you would ask any of those tools. The difference is that it can also do the work.
Agentic AI takes far more than a chat does. To draft a response to a client email well, the agent has to understand the full itinerary, the client's needs, and your brand voice. It pulls in everything about the trip, not just the words in a message, and gets the task right. That extra work costs more to run. Agentic AI is genuinely more expensive, and Tern's pricing reflects that. It’s also tremendously more valuable.
Even the top upgrade costs about what 5 hours of a copilot's time runs at $30 an hour, which is roughly what the average advisor bought on Lucia in a month. The difference is that the agent never clocks out. If Tern AI helps you sell even $1,500 more in travel, the top Tern Pro upgrade more than pays for itself. Add custom reporting and everything else that comes with it, and we think this is the best value in travel. You get to make the hire without any of the hassle of hiring, right up until you are ready to bring on a person for the part only a person can do.
This is optional
Tern Pro is an optional upgrade for those that need more usage. We believe every advisor should be supercharged by AI which is why we’re including AI usage in every Tern subscription.
We are not making the base platform worse to push you toward it, and we are going to keep investing in it. Unless a feature is only possible because of AI, we will keep building the non-AI version too, so that if you are not in a place to pay for the upgrade, you can keep doing the work manually. That is completely okay.
We built this because we believe every advisor should have an AI agent. That is why we have deliberately created room in our own margin to cover the cost, so that everyone on Tern can actually use it.
The ceiling does not exist anymore
For a generation, good advisors have hit this ceiling and decided the next step was not worth it. The admin was too heavy. The help was too expensive, or too hard to find, or too dull for anyone to take on.
That ceiling does not have to exist anymore. You do not have to choose between growing your business and keeping your sanity. The hire you were never going to make is here, and it costs less than a single trip.
Tern’s Agentic AI is live today and available with no usage limits and no additional cost until July 1, 2026.