AI is poised to take on some of the traditional roles in asset management, and the sector can no longer ignore it.
Royal London Asset Management’s chief data officer, Rob Middleton said firms need to stop skirting the conversation and accept that the shift is already reshaping how teams work.
“We have to attempt to get into workshop settings with open minded people about what we want to be,” he said. “It doesn’t change the fundamental premise, but it may change the way we deliver that to our clients.”
He admitted that for many roles, the writing is already on the wall.
“Anything that looks like data, ETL-type tasks that have been done manually, forget about it,” he said.
Coding roles are also at risk: “Code-cutting as a pure science… forget about it.”
But Middleton also acknowledged the anxiety surrounding this shift, present in his own organisation. Some researchers, he said, are “a little nervous that it is coming for their job.”
A shrinking workload for humans
Middleton said AI will radically compress the time humans spend pulling data together, a cornerstone of junior roles across the sector.
“The amount of time spent getting at data and assembling it… you’ll probably flip,” he said, arguing that machines will take on the heavy lifting while analysts shift to interpretation and oversight.
But the transition won’t be comfortable.
He stressed the need to bring HR into the process early: “How do we do that in a way that doesn’t alienate people, that doesn’t cause tremendous strife?”
Asset managers, he suggested, must think realistically about future team structures as AI becomes “agentic” and begins working through tasks autonomously.
Despite brewing fears of an AI bubble, with recent Bank of England warnings of over-investment across the industry, Wednesday night’s Nvidia results prove the arms race is undoubtedly accelerating.
Asset managers from boutique firms to global houses are deploying internal tools for memo drafting, scenario modelling and document analysis.
They are essentially compressing work that once took hours into minutes.
Middleton warned that the regulator will insist on a human backstop for years to come: “I would expect for at least some time, all of our use of models and AI to go under a human’s nose before you do anything serious.”
But, he added: “You can’t just shrug shoulders and point at the black box when things aren’t [right].”
Royal London has begun running future-mapping exercises to understand how roles will evolve.
Middleton admits that while no one has all the answers, the industry in the next three to five years is “going to look very different from today”.