By Isabelle Bousquette
BlackRock has been on a tear over the last several years to embed artificial intelligence into nearly everything, from the way it makes investment decisions to how it serves clients and operates internally.
Now the firm is beginning to roll out a new platform that will make it easier for employees across the company to quickly spin up AI agents for specialized tasks.
Nish Ajitsaria, senior managing director, head of Aladdin Product Engineering, and the firm's executive sponsor for AI, said he is chasing down a future in which AI becomes the default mode for executing most processes, from research to coding. Meanwhile, human roles will become less specialized, and more cross-functional, working in more nimble "squads" to oversee the AI's busywork.
BlackRock is the world's largest investment firm and manages some $14 trillion in assets. Chief Executive Larry Fink has called AI "the most significant technology since, at least, the computer," while admitting its potential long-term effect on the U.S. labor market is an "enormously important question."
Ajitsaria said, "How all work is orchestrated and is done, and who does it, changes with AI."
That future isn't quite here yet, he said. "We can talk about reimagined workflows, but that's an implementation transformation initiative that doesn't just happen overnight," he said. "I don't know that anyone has cracked the nut."
Within asset management broadly, everyone is using AI these days, said Shona O'Hea, head of asset management industry for Grant Thornton Advisors. Leaders in the area are distinguished by the size of their financial investment, the quality of their data and their governance protocols to support scaling AI across the organization.
Still, even for those leaders, the full reimagining of the workforce isn't something they have tackled yet. "But it is coming and I think they fully recognize that that's part of the next three to five years," she said.
Building more agents
The new platform, RockAI, will become the go-to interface for all the AI agents built inside BlackRock. Its natural language interface lets users pick the AI models, enter the relevant context and connect to the necessary databases for, say, an agent designed to research the top two real-estate investment trusts in the U.S.
All the safety and security guardrails are already built in, meaning users can spin up new agents in minutes without actually writing any code, said Pavan Pemmaraju, a senior lead in software engineering on Ajitsaria's team. And those agents will be ready to scale across the business.
The platform was rolled out to its 5,000 in-house developers last Friday, but BlackRock said the goal is to later roll out the tool firmwide, so that even those in nontechnical roles, dubbed "citizen developers," can start vibe-coding agents that can replace large chunks of their own busywork -- and share them with colleagues.
The firm has had success with a bottom-up approach in recent years.
AI in investing
In 2024, equity investors working at BlackRock collaborated with its internal AI Labs team to build Asimov, an investment research platform, underpinned by hundreds of agents, that autonomously monitors investment theses, continuously consuming information from earnings reports, regulatory filings, research and other internal BlackRock sources.
Asimov helps around 150 of the firm's employees in its fundamental equity unit make investing decisions, but it is being scaled out to other investment divisions managing different asset classes as well, said Shawn Simpson, a data scientist on BlackRock's AI Labs team.
The Labs team, which was spun up in 2018, is a unit of researchers who help build AI solutions for the firm, Simpson said.
AI for productivity
Beyond specialized AI tools for investing, Ajitsaria said his team is also investing in productivity tools for employees across the firm.
For client-facing roles, that comes in the form of the Client Intelligence Platform, a system that summarizes data from a variety of client touchpoints and helps managers prepare for meetings and interactions. In legal, AI is part of the contracting process. And in human resources, a new agent will soon be able to not only answer questions about benefits and policies, but also take actions, like writing and submitting quarterly employee objectives.
Ajitsaria said the firm was early to deploy chatbots that help employees track down information from company systems, and now it is in the process of turning those chatbots into agents that can take action.
The strategy going forward, Ajitsaria said, is "being very bullish and really believing in the transformative dimension of this general purpose technology and the fact that it applies to every business process and every domain across the firm."
Write to Isabelle Bousquette at isabelle.bousquette@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
April 21, 2026 07:00 ET (11:00 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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