Why fund managers need to adapt skills for competitive edge with AI

InvestorDaily

The rising popularity of AI has sparked a number of discussions in the last 18 months over its implementation in everyday life, but perhaps the biggest theme to come to the forefront has been the extent to which the technology could disrupt human work. According to Australian-based quantitative investor RQI Investors, everyone will be impacted, but the full extent of this impact on various professions, including investment management, remains unknown. “AI is not magic. It is a tool, and it’s a very clever tool, very clever technology, that can make repetitive tasks much more efficiently performed or it can learn to do smaller functions that require less creative input,” David Walsh, head of investment at RQI Investors, told InvestorDaily.

In a recent paper on the threat or promise of AI in investing, Walsh explored a number of ways in which AI could disrupt the industry, including stock selection and trading, automation through coding and report writing, pattern recognition, and the act of summarising unstructured data. While AI could be useful in some areas of the job, especially in performing mundane, time-consuming tasks, its abilities, according to Walsh, should be viewed as a supplement to a manager’s day-to-day activities. “The creative component of it, the ideas, the insight used in investment management, won’t come from an AI, and it shouldn’t.”

The rest of this article can be found at investordaily.com.au.