BlackRock manages roughly 11.6 trillion dollars in assets. That scale alone would be an AI story. The more interesting part is how they funded the AI investment without touching the business that actually pays their bills. Here's the structural setup most people miss. BlackRock's core investment advisory business, over 80% of total revenue, isn't where the AI budget comes from. Their Aladdin platform, originally built as internal infrastructure to manage BlackRock's own portfolios, became a separate Technology Services business they now license to other asset managers, including direct competitors. That division alone generated roughly 𝟰𝟯𝟲 𝗺𝗶𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗱𝗼𝗹𝗹𝗮𝗿𝘀 in Q1 2025, on pace toward over 𝟰.𝟰 𝗯𝗶𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗱𝗼𝗹𝗹𝗮𝗿𝘀 𝗮𝗻𝗻𝘂𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆. That's the real unlock. BlackRock isn't funding AI Labs and cutting-edge model research by justifying cost savings against their core advisory business the way most companies have to. They're funding it...
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Goldman Sachs gave 10,000 employees, roughly a quarter of its entire workforce, secret access to an internal AI tool for over a year before anyone outside the company knew it existed. That quiet pilot phase is worth noting on its own. While competitors were announcing AI initiatives in press releases, Goldman spent a year running a closed test with a meaningful chunk of its actual staff before deciding it was ready for a real rollout. When they did launch publicly in mid-2025, they didn't ease in. The GS AI Assistant went to all 46,500-plus employees worldwide, firewalled entirely behind Goldman's own infrastructure specifically so no sensitive client or trading data could ever leak into an external model. CIO Marco Argenti, hired from Amazon, built it as a simple chat interface, but with something more sophisticated running underneath. Here's the architecture decision that actually matters. Goldman built a multi-model system with role-based behavior, meaning a banker's...