<\/p>\n
You can also listen to this podcast on iono.fm here.<\/p>\n
SIMON BROWN: I\u2019m chatting now with Duggan Matthews. He is CIO at Marriott. Duggan, I always appreciate the early morning time.<\/p>\n
AI \u2013 and using it in the investing world. The first caveat I think we need to put out is that AI is just moving so fast. I was loving Claude Opus 4.6, and then literally weeks after it arrived 4.7 came. Of course, we know that Mythos is on the horizon too.<\/p>\n
What you\u2019ve done, you and your team at Marriott, you\u2019ve kind of gone back to the beginning and rebuilt architecture from the ground up, using AI as a big part of that process.<\/p>\n
DUGGAN MATTHEWS: Yes, Simon. Needless to say, \u2018moving fast\u2019 is probably an understatement. It\u2019s going to be the technology of our lifetimes. I think everywhere everybody is starting to really feel that. It takes a while to adopt a change, but I think when the changes are profound you have to.<\/p>\n
Read:
Why the world\u2019s banks are so worried about Anthropic\u2019s latest AI\u00a0model
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Recent advancements in artificial intelligence models<\/p>\n
For asset management in particular, if you think about what we do, we analyse data and look for trends and patterns \u2013 and it\u2019s quite in parallel with what AI is doing.<\/p>\n
So our view was we have to leverage this; this is a massive enabler for what we\u2019re trying to deliver to our clients. And, being a relatively small business \u2013 a medium-sized business, we\u2019re not a giant \u2013 there are resource constraints that we face.<\/p>\n
But with AI essentially commoditised, a large part of intelligence, for us it has been massively exciting to leverage what we do. To do that we went back to the first principle and thought how much of our process can AI digest? Let it digest that; let\u2019s not resist that if it\u2019s good at it.<\/p>\n
Let the AI do those tasks and free up our analysts to focus on areas where they can now continue to add a lot of value, which would be in interpretation of nuance and complexity and ambiguity \u2013 and investing is full of that.<\/p>\n
That was the thinking; let AI do what it does well.<\/p>\n
Let it continue to digest parts of the process that it\u2019s going to be able to digest as it improves, and really build a team focused on dealing with the things that that the human mind is best at doing.<\/p>\n
Read: World\u2019s biggest pension fund sees AI replacing asset managers<\/p>\n
SIMON BROWN: That\u2019s a great point. And I like your point. Back in the day, size so much mattered. If you were the company with, I don\u2019t know, a hundred analysts, you just had an advantage over the company with 10 analysts. That\u2019s no longer the case, because AI is now doing that grunt work.<\/p>\n
I do it. I will throw a ton of data to it, something that would take me days to do. Maybe I\u2019m the slow guy in the room, but it would take me days. AI now does it a couple of hours. That leaves the analysts to do the thinking, which is the part that AI is perhaps not the best at.<\/p>\n
DUGGAN MATTHEWS: Yes, absolutely. I just think [it\u2019s] a massive playing-field leveller across industries, Simon. So the days of having a hundred analysts as your competitive advantage \u2013 those are long gone.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s really going to be the architecture around how you harness the AI, and how you harness the human, and how you get the most out of that architecture in a similar way to data.<\/p>\n
If you go back many, many years, maybe an investment firm\u2019s edge was data. Maybe they had more data than other investors. But data has been commoditised. There\u2019s just so much data on publicly listed investments everywhere. So that sort of advantage from an investment perspective has been eroded.<\/p>\n
Read:
Can AI assist with investing?
Hedge funds eye AI bots to track hundreds of stocks
What AI can do (and what it can\u2019t)<\/p>\n
Now when it comes to processing data, that is where the advantage moved. Now we have a tool like Bloomberg that can really process the data. So we have to recognise this as a threat to the proposition.<\/p>\n
But having said that, if used wisely it is a massive opportunity and investors should be hugely excited about this, because their portfolios at the end of the day should be more risk-aware and produce better risk-adjusted outcomes if we use this technology and maximise its benefit for them.<\/p>\n
SIMON BROWN: Yes. Investors, definitely. A quick question, a last question that comes to mind. Does [being] boutique now almost become the advantage? Back in the day it was size. Now it is not large size as the advantage. It\u2019s actually small \u2013 perhaps boutique \u2013 as niche is the advantage.<\/p>\n
DUGGAN MATTHEWS: Yes, I think smaller-sized firms have always had the benefit of being nimble, with maybe entrepreneurial cultures, established settled teams.<\/p>\n
But the disadvantage or the trade-off was sometimes breadth and depth of coverage because you\u2019re just not going to have as many analysts. So I think your medium-sized, smaller businesses are really going to be able to overcome that disadvantage while still providing the benefits associated with a smaller organisation.<\/p>\n
So the two used to be in tension \u2013 and I don\u2019t think so anymore, Simon.<\/p>\n
Read: Advance financial processes with artificial intelligence<\/p>\n
SIMON BROWN: We\u2019ll leave that there. Duggan Matthews, CIO at Marriott. appreciate the early morning time.<\/p>\n
#Rebuilding #investment #strategies #era<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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