Senior industry leaders at the Investment Association’s EnTech Global conference highlight rapid AI advancements, opportunities for efficiency gains, and the need for strategic technology deployment to overhaul asset management operations.
Artificial intelligence is on the verge of reshaping how asset managers operate, senior industry executives told delegates at the Investment Association’s EnTech Global conference in London on 12 March 2026, but realising that pot...
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ential will require firms to change how they spend on and deploy technology.
Ben Lucas, chief executive of Amundi Technology, said recent progress has moved AI beyond incremental task improvements toward outcomes that can affect revenues and margins. Speaking on the panel, Lucas said: “In the last three months, I have seen more material advancement on things that I believe will hit the top or bottom line than I had seen in the last 18 months,” adding: “I’m much more confident in what is coming through at the moment.” He argued Amundi Technology, as a technology arm of Europe’s largest asset manager, is positioned to offer a European data platform capable of assembling AI services for clients, and reported early signs that these capabilities are beginning to show in the company’s own margin and efficiency. He said: “We are starting to see that from a top-line perspective,” and: “We are starting to see the flow through on the other side in terms of our own margin and efficiency.”
Those commercial opportunities come against a backdrop of heavy and, to date, uneven technology spending across the industry. A consultancy report published in June 2025 found that technology budgets have climbed sharply, with limited correlation to productivity gains, as managers devote most of their IT outlays to maintaining legacy systems rather than financing firmwide transformation. According to McKinsey, the firmwide impact of AI, generative AI and emergent agentic systems could be equivalent to 25% to 40% of an average asset manager’s cost base if deployed effectively, but capturing that upside demands a step-change in how projects are prioritised and scaled.
Executives at the conference said practical barriers remain as well as opportunities. Lucas warned that many productivity gains can be unlocked by better adopting existing tools , remote-working platforms, digital signatures and other long-established technologies have yet to be used to their full effect. As he put it: “Everybody is obsessed with the latest AI agent that is going to change the world but there is latent productivity everywhere around us.” He added: “If we can transform some of the cultural and human inertia that holds us back and make better use of what we already have, that would be a brilliant starting point.”
For client-facing wealth businesses, AI promises to address long-standing access and efficiency challenges. Mark Duckworth, group chief executive of Schroders Personal Wealth, highlighted the low rate of financial-advice uptake in the U.K. and the steep fall in adviser numbers since 1990, saying technology can expand reach. “For the first time I am genuinely hopeful for a seismic shift, and the technology that comes along with that is pivotal,” he said, describing how voice capture and meeting transcription, introduced as part of a technology-led strategy, now let advisers focus fully on clients. “The next step is to algorithmically move that into a recommendation,” Duckworth added, and he said Schroders Personal Wealth plans to deploy agentic AI to clients in the second quarter of 2026. “I am hoping that will be the start of this creation.”
Industry figures emphasised the need for human oversight and responsible deployment. Sam Alexander, UK country officer and chief operating officer at DWS Group, said innovation should remain anchored in accountable workflows so firms can scale new tools without losing control. “I would like to see AI replace repetitive tasks,” she said. “Get rid of those, and we can do more interesting stuff.”
The commercialisation of AI services is already taking shape through vendor platforms and client rollouts. Amundi Technology has been building cloud-native, modular investment systems used by firms such as Van Lanschot Kempen, which recently adopted Amundi’s Alto Investment platform to consolidate portfolio management, data and middle-office functions. The technology unit was also listed among WealthTech100 companies, reflecting its growing profile in the sector. Amundi Technology appointed Benjamin Lucas as CEO in April 2023 to accelerate such platform-led, data-driven offerings.
Consultants urge asset managers to focus AI investment on high-impact, scalable use cases , such as portfolio-manager copilot agents or developer code copilots , that can be implemented relatively quickly while delivering measurable productivity lifts. McKinsey’s analysis suggests prioritising change-the-business initiatives that can be scaled firmwide rather than one-off projects that fail to move the needle.
As firms test agentic and generative systems in production environments, the debate will turn to governance, measurable returns and how rapidly scale can be achieved. Executives at the conference voiced cautious optimism: technology and data are largely in place, cloud migration is well advanced, and the next phase will be about execution and change management if the industry is to capture the sizable cost and service gains that consultants and platform vendors say are within reach.
Source: Noah Wire Services
