How AI is speeding up the slow investing game

Business Insider

01-07-2025

It took an AllianceBernstein healthcare analyst just one afternoon to analyze what would have once taken her months: the potential impact of President Donald Trump's "Big, Beautiful Bill" on specific drugs and insurance plans across state lines.
Andrew Chin, the firm's chief artificial intelligence officer, said the analyst used one of the $790 billion asset manager's in-house tools to quickly interpret the legislation and identify which companies would be affected, allowing her to make a fast, confident investment call.
"Because she was able to do that, she was able to make money for our client portfolios a lot faster," said Chin, adding that the analyst "locked in some of the alpha" in a way that was not previously possible.
Fundamental investors take a slow and methodical approach to their investment decisions. Whether reviewing financial statements or talking to vendors and company executives, it can take months for a fundamental investor to reach a conclusion about what to invest in and at what price.
Not anymore. Artificial intelligence is changing the slow investing game popularized by investors like Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway and Peter Lynch of Fidelity.
While asset managers have long used machine learning to crunch spreadsheets and detect trading signals—especially in quant and systematic strategies— these tools can also quickly digest and analyze vast reams of unstructured information, like earnings call transcripts, regulatory filings, and even emails. It's allowing large asset managers to make fundamental investing decisions faster than ever before.
Here are three firms that are using AI to transform their investment processes:
JPMorgan Asset Management
Two and a half years ago, JPMorgan Asset Management AI strategist Dillon Edwards sat down with upward of 50 portfolio managers to understand what they needed. He asked them about the screens they use, the questions they ask themselves throughout the day, and the common thread was, "Just get our attention to the right data, at the right time, in the right place."
That request led to the creation of Smart Monitor, which Edwards described as "Spotify for the investor." It scans mountains of data to surface timely, relevant insights for the firm's portfolio managers and analysts.
Smart Monitor is part of JPMorgan's broader AI build-out for its $3.7 trillion asset management arm, which is hosted on a platform called Spectrum. Another tool within this platform is Moneyball, which helps portfolio managers identify and correct potential biases in their investment decisions by analyzing historical data and market behaviors.
Rather than building something new for investors to learn, Edwards and his team focused on AI directly into the process that investors have spent years perfecting.
The bottom-up approach has helped to minimize AI skeptics: A handful of "champion" PMs worked closely with engineers during development and became in-house unofficial salespeople who market it to their own teams.
"No one wants another tool, another thing to do, something that the AI team somehow thinks is going to be helpful for an investor without empathizing with what they're doing today," he said.
Kristian West, JPMorgan Asset Management's head of investment platform, said the firm is also developing similar tools with the goal of seeing if they can continue to scale the quantitative process, or data-driven systematic investing.
"That's an area where we think it is just pretty obvious, whereas technology and data capabilities improve, those two worlds collide a lot more," he said.
Alliance Bernstein
For fundamental investors—portfolio managers and analysts who base long-term decisions on a deep understanding of individual companies—this marks a turning point: a chance to move faster and dig deeper, but also a moment to rethink how they work.
Chin calls this evolution the rise of the "iron person": a human investor enhanced by AI armor. Not a replacement, but an upgrade.
AB has developed an internal chatbot called AB AI, along with several tools to help pull from internal data, prep for company meetings, or conduct research tailored to the manager's investment philosophy.
Chin said that many AB analysts often develop their own AI agents using ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot with specific prompts to, for example, run an analysis on the companies in their sector after an earnings call.
"They're able to then analyze companies the way they want to, so they get a more tailored or customized version of what the tool can provide them," he said.
Chin said about 75% of the firm's over 500 investment professionals are using their tools.
People sharing stories like "it takes me a day rather than a month to do something, or I was able to get this insight that I did not get before," have driven others to try it, said Chin.
For the remaining 25% who haven't picked up AI, he believes they "will just naturally come when they see the performance of their counterparts has gotten better."
BlackRock
A big reveal from BlackRock's investor day last month shows just how fast the field is moving. The $11 trillion investing behemoth has launched Asimov, an agentic AI platform for its fundamental equity business. Agentic AI doesn't just answer questions following prompts — it can take action on its own.
"While everyone else is sleeping at night, we have these virtual AI agents, they're scanning research notes, company filings, emails to generate portfolio insights," the firm's chief operating officer, Robert Goldstein, said.
He hopes Asimov will be deployed across the firm by the next investor day, offering investors at the world's biggest asset manager a powerful teammate.
Raffaele Savi, its global head of systemic investing, underscored how significantly AI is affecting the investing world.
The speed and power of having "real-time, millions of stimulations a day happening in the background, developing situational awareness" that helps ensure the portfolio reflects the manager's intentions are "profound."
"The world has changed tremendously," he said.