ANZ, an Australian bank, was among the first to explore the possibility of using AI for wealth management by using Watson to help financial advisors better understand their clients. BlackRock has built its own AI engine, while Goldman uses AI-based financial research platform Kensho.
"There's information out there that is highly correlated to stock return, bond return and market return," said Jody Kochansky, head of the Aladdin product group at BlackRock. "We believe that the firms that can get organized around their data, understand and are able to research what all those data are telling them and predicting can ultimately invest in a way to create better returns for clients." Aladdin, which is based on open source technology and Hadoop, uses natural-language processing to read thousands of documents, including news stories and broker reports, and comes up with a sentiment score on the entities or companies the articles mention.