BlackRock COO Robert Goldstein: AI a ‘whole new world’
Blackrock’s Robert Goldstein says generative AI’s language capabilities are simply unlike anything he’s seen in his career. And the executive who Fortune called a “boy wonder” all the way back in 2012 has seen the company evolve significantly, having spent the entirety of his 30-year career at BlackRock.
AI “will be the most significant technology, innovation, evolution, revolution of my 30-year career,” Goldstein said at the Fortune Future of Finance conference in New York City on Thursday.
.@BlackRock COO Robert Goldstein says Gen AI’s problem-solving abilities will help unlock what “will be the most significant technology, innovation, evolution, revolution of my 30-year career.” #FortuneFinance | https://t.co/QYQjxQxowp pic.twitter.com/pTSM4KYIZl
— FORTUNE (@FortuneMagazine) May 16, 2024
Goldstein has spent the entirety of his career at BlackRock, joining the firm when he was 20 years old in 1994. At the time BlackRock had around 55 employees. It has since grown to the largest asset manager in the world with record assets under management of more than $10 trillion. As BlackRock’s stature grew, so has Goldstein’s within the firm’s walls. Goldstein was named to the firm’s executive committee in 2012, and he’s now reportedly in the running to replace Larry Fink, the company’s cofounder and the only CEO it has had throughout its 36-year history.
Goldstein has been an internal leader on fintech and AI for years. BlackRock’s proprietary Aladdin platform, which Goldstein has long overseen, is powered by AI. At Future of Finance, Goldstein called AI an “incredible force” that is reshaping everything BlackRock does from its hiring strategies, to its communication with clients, to how employees come up with investment ideas.
As BlackRock’s workforce evolved so to has its business with the rise of AI, a trend Goldstein has been highlighting for years. In 2018, he told the Financial Times that “AI may be in a big hype cycle but there’s no doubt the technology is real and changing the world already. This is about increasing the efficiency of what we do across the board. Every part of our business is already being augmented by these new capabilities.”
Onstage, Goldstein said he was impressed with the ability of modern-day AI tools to understand regular human language in a way they hadn’t been able to in the past. Until chatbots like ChatGPT and Google’s Bard made AI user-friendly, the tech had required extensive expertise in math and computer science. That all changed when large language models allowed people to interact with AI using normal, everyday language.
“Everything we were doing really was centered on numbers,” Goldstein said. “Now, what’s happening with generative AI is that you’re able to extend your problems and solutions to be more about words and language.”
About 25% of the company’s employees are technologists, Goldstein said, but this evolution of AI is changing how BlackRock is recruiting, he said, including hiring employees with less traditional finance backgrounds. A growing number of early-career analysts that join BlackRock right out of college have liberal arts degrees that have little to do with finance, according to Goldstein. Having young employees with a variety of educational backgrounds ensures the company brings in a diversity of experiences and perspectives, and the evolution of AI is helping with this, he said.
Goldstein pointed out that AI has been around since the 1960s, when MIT established an AI research lab. “What’s brand new, for the past few years, has been this confluence of more data than anyone could have imagined a few years ago, and the amount of compute capacity in the world and how you access it,” Goldstein said.
“It’s a whole new world,” he said.
