Artificial intelligence, or AI, in the financial sector has moved from the testing lab to the investment desk.
Nvidia Corp.’s (ticker: NVDA) 2026 State of AI in Financial Services Report found that about 90% of over 800 financial professionals said their organizations are either actively using or assessing AI solutions or pilot projects, and 65% reported that their companies’ use of AI is already in progress. Their businesses are thriving because of it: 64% of respondents said AI has increased annual revenue by more than 5%, while 61% said it has reduced annual costs by more than 5%.
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This may not be a newsflash for you if you communicate regularly with a brokerage or advisor, or own a business yourself. But for investors, the more interesting shift is where AI is showing up. It’s not just in back-office automation. Asset managers are increasingly using it to help with research, fund management and portfolio construction.
AI is “raising the baseline by making information gathering, synthesis and analysis faster and more accessible across the industry,” says Vinit Agrawal, head of investment data insights and AI solutions for T. Rowe Price. “Activities such as reviewing earnings calls, comparing company disclosures and synthesizing large volumes of research can now be completed far more efficiently.”
But AI is not simply making active managers faster. It may also be changing what separates top firms from the rest. “Investment edge does not come simply from processing more information,” Agrawal says. “It comes from transforming information into proprietary insight through judgment, experience, sector expertise and a willingness to challenge consensus.”
AI can process information at a scale and speed human analysts can’t match, but markets are shaped by judgment calls that don’t always fit neatly into historical data. Human judgment remains essential for interpreting nuance, evaluating management quality and making decisions when markets shift, Agrawal says. As he puts it, the future of investing is “not human versus machine,” but human judgment enhanced by AI.
Here are some of the top investment firms using AI for asset management today:
— BlackRock Inc. (BLK)
— JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM)
— T. Rowe Price Group Inc. (TROW)
— Vanguard Group
— Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS)
— Man Group
BlackRock Inc. (BLK)
With a record $15.3 trillion in managed assets as of the end of June, BlackRock is one of the globe’s most prominent corporate money managers, and it has not been shy about spending on AI to keep it that way. Exhibit A is the company’s proprietary technology hub Aladdin, which serves as the “brain” behind BlackRock’s money management nervous system.
Aladdin uses AI to help investors and advisors move from insight to action more quickly by reducing manual work and expanding access to information, according to Nish Ajitsaria, Aladdin’s head of product management.
“As portfolios become increasingly complex and interconnected, we believe the combination of AI, governed data, robust analytics and institutional-grade controls can help investors see risks and opportunities more clearly, make more informed decisions and navigate markets with greater confidence,” Ajitsaria says.
JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM)
J.P. Morgan Asset Management is using AI across the investment process, but not in the “robots are running the portfolio” sense. Kristian West, head of investment platform for J.P. Morgan, says AI can enhance idea generation, research, risk analysis, portfolio construction, trading and client reporting, but the best outcomes come from combining AI with the judgment of investment professionals.
A major piece of that effort is Spectrum, J.P. Morgan’s proprietary investment platform. Spectrum uses AI and data science to turn structured and unstructured research into investment intelligence, while the company says SpectrumIQ combines data, human expertise and AI to support “stronger, faster and smarter” decisions. West says the firm’s generative AI tool, called Moneyball, also uses AI to analyze past decisions, identify patterns in investment outcomes and monitor for behavioral biases, while keeping final accountability with human investment professionals.
T. Rowe Price Group Inc. (TROW)
T. Rowe Price started investing in data science and machine learning capabilities nearly 10 years ago. Today, it’s using AI as “intelligent augmentation,” or IA, to support better investment decisions without automating them.
“AI tools are being used to summarize research and earnings materials, analyze unstructured content, compare company disclosures and improve access to relevant information across large datasets,” Agrawal says. The goal is to “help investment professionals move more quickly from information gathering to analysis.”
The firm is also exploring agent-based AI tools, Agrawal says. “For example, one application analyzes the consensus, or ‘street view,’ across different asset classes and investment themes and compares it with our own research and perspectives to help identify areas where T. Rowe Price may have a differentiated view or potential investment edge.”
[Read: 7 Agentic AI Stocks and ETFs to Buy]
Vanguard Group
Vanguard is using AI in a very Vanguard way: not to make investing look flashier, but to make research, advice and portfolio conversations more scalable. “Investors don’t have to trade transparency for innovation,” because the firm views AI as a tool that augments human expertise rather than replaces it, according to Mani Iyer, chief AI and technology officer at Vanguard.
The firm’s in-house quantitative equity managers use proprietary AI models they manage, while investment experts evaluate model outputs before they’re incorporated into portfolios, Iyer says. Vanguard’s Expert Insights capability uses generative AI to deliver personalized portfolio analysis for advisors. The tool includes article summaries for investors to help tailor Vanguard research by financial acumen and investing life stage. Iyer says the goal is better access to personalized guidance, with strong governance, clarity and human oversight.
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS)
Goldman Sachs brings a systematic angle to the AI asset management story. And with more than 35 years of experience in systematic, data-driven investing, over 15 years using AI and more than 1 trillion data points as of March 31, the firm’s quantitative investment specialists know what they’re doing.
The team uses natural language processing and advanced technology within deep learning models to analyze text and audio that portfolio managers can use in their decision making. Newer models can even pick up the subtleties of human speech across different languages to help portfolio managers understand management sentiment during earnings calls.
“It works because it pays to be data-driven,” Osman Ali, global co-head of quantitative investment strategies for Goldman Sachs Asset Management, said in a recent company podcast. “It pays to be dispassionate in your investing, and it pays to be dynamic because as the world changes, as markets change, as data changes, we adapt and evolve these models to help us gain an informational edge in the markets that we operate in.”
Man Group
Man Group offers one of the clearest examples of AI being used for asset management. In February, the global alternative investment manager announced a partnership with Anthropic to help “put AI at the center of investing,” with a primary focus on using AI for alpha generation. The partnership uses Anthropic’s Claude alongside Man Group’s proprietary technology platform to facilitate the transition from raw datasets to investment decisions, including code execution and integrating insights for portfolio management teams.
The firm’s Man AHL division has used machine learning for more than a decade, and it’s now building proprietary generative AI tools such as AlphaGPT. The firm describes AlphaGPT as an agentic AI research workflow that can brainstorm investment hypotheses, turn those ideas into code and evaluate potential signals against the same standards used for human-generated research. While the tool still requires human oversight and strategic direction, Man Group believes it can help researchers process more data, test more ideas and identify potential alpha signals more efficiently.
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6 Top Investment Firms Using AI for Asset Management originally appeared on usnews.com
Update 07/31/26: This story was previously published at an earlier date and has been updated with new information.
