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Banking & finance
BusinessBanking & Finance

BlackRock: AI tools like ChatGPT are a ‘revolution’ in investment analysis, able to pull nuance from vast data sets

  • Daily news, broker reports, government statistics and geospatial data can all be analysed by AI to give clues about investment direction, says co-CIO
  • World’s largest asset manager believes AI will be transformational, but its use is less about replacing people than augmenting investment analysis

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The BlackRock logo is pictured outside the company’s headquarters in the Manhattan borough of New York City on May 25, 2021. Photo: Reuters
Mia Castagnone
Big data, data science and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies like ChatGPT are shaping the finance industry, and asset manager BlackRock is bullish about using these fast-evolving technologies to help clients build better portfolios.
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An AI model using machine learning can crunch massive amounts of data to help investment analysts assess economic conditions, said Jeff Shen, co-CIO and co-head of systematic active equity at BlackRock, the world’s biggest money manager with US$9.42 trillion in assets under management as of June 30.

Daily news, broker reports, expert insights and government statistics all provide data that can be analysed by AI to give clues about the underlying economic situation, he said. Meanwhile, geospatial information can be used to identify trends by analysing patterns in, for example, the movement of trucks in and out of a company’s warehouses, or foot traffic in a city.

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“We are in this world where big data is upon us, and a lot of things can be measured that could be relevant to investment,” Shen said at a media round-table in Hong Kong on Tuesday. “Generative AI and big data is transforming pretty much every industry out there. I don’t think investment will be immune to it.”

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How does China’s AI stack up against ChatGPT?

How does China’s AI stack up against ChatGPT?
Generative AI tools based on large language models (LLMs) such as Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Baidu’s Ernie Bot, as well as image-based generative tools such as Midjourney, have gone viral around the globe this year, attracting the attention of businesses eager to find ways to exploit the technology.
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