Rage against the machine, six years on
One of the first blogs on this site was called "Rage against the machine". It was about AI arriving in financial markets, machine learning, automation and the idea that it might change the way the industry worked.
Reading it back now is a bit like looking at an old photo. The haircut's wrong, but the face is recognisable.
Adoption isn't the story any more
AI is now everywhere in investment management. Research from Substantive Research and Aiera this summer found 77% of the large asset managers they surveyed are already running GenAI in some form. (The TRADE)
The same research found the bigger barrier isn't the technology. It's getting the data in: licensing, entitlements and compliance sign-off, with some firms waiting months just to onboard a model.
That matches what I hear from almost every AI platform I talk to. AI is only as good as the data behind it, and a lot of firms still don't have data reliable enough to make the most of it.
"Good enough" is the real competitor
A sales leader selling AI into private markets told me recently that the competitor he fought hardest wasn't another specialist start-up. It was a general-purpose tool already sitting open on everyone's screen.
That's a very different sale to the one I was writing about in 2020. The pitch used to be "come and see what's possible". Now everyone in the room already knows what's possible. The question is why they should pay for yours.
The firms winning that argument usually have something the general tools can't copy: niche data, or workflows embedded so deeply that switching costs more than staying.
The hard part is year two
The other pattern I keep hearing is about renewals. Winning the first year is one thing. Driving real adoption inside a client so they renew in year two is another thing entirely. It's a behaviour change problem as much as a technology one.
Which is why the people these businesses need have changed as well. Less "evangelist for a new category", more people who can prove ROI, drive adoption and hold onto clients once the novelty wears off.
The technology will keep evolving. The ability to turn it into commercial outcomes is much harder to copy.
Photo: Hassan Pasha on Unsplash