Portfolio managers are safe from AI. Analysts are not
AI is all the rage. And while Anthropic is gearing up its IPO for next week, the asset managers who will debate the firm’s place in client portfolios are quietly stressing about their own role in the industry, courtesy of the new technologies displacing them.
Click here to join the bubble by eFinancialCareers, our new anonymous community. ✍️
A recent report from the Alternative Investment Management Association (AIMA) – a trade organization that acts a bit like CFA Institute for the buy-side – found unwavering confidence from the industry’s portfolio managers, an substantially less from its analysts.
74% of buy-side professionals polled by AIMA thought that portfolio managers were the profession least likely to be impacted by generative AI. Amusingly, none of them at all thought that portfolio management was the most exposed profession. On an unrelated note, JPMorgan built AI agents that beat 60/40 portfolios earlier this year, Bloomberg reported.
The least safe, or perhaps the most pessimistically viewd about their role in the world, were professionals working administrative tasks. That’s hardly a surprise, as banks are pretty open about how AI can replace them. Really, it’s a slight surprise that 9% of them think they are the safest people in the industry.
Close behind administrative professionals however, and much more strangely, was investment analysts. “If Gen AI assumes more junior analytical work,” AIMA’s report asked, “firms may need new ways to give future portfolio managers the experience through which investment judgement has traditionally developed.”
It’s a reasonable proposition, although it is one that has been put forward before. Jeremy Leung, a T. Rowe Price AI solutions manager and former UBS portfolio manager, wrote in March 2026 that the time analysts spend “reading hundreds of filings, updating endless models, listening to management teams quarter after quarter” was disappearing. AI was changing that and making the role more “barbell-shaped”, with a “smaller number of genuinely high-leverage analysts at one end, and a more standardised, system-mediated research function at the other.” Analysts, perhaps ye need not fret.
In the middle of AIMA’s survey were technology, compliance, and legal professionals. Curiously, despite being relatively split on AI’s impact in the report, these are generally considered as the professions most at risk of AI displacement.
Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you’d like to share? Contact: +44 7537 182250 (SMS, WhatsApp or voicemail). Telegram: @SarahButcher. Signal: sarahbutcher.22 Click here to fill in our anonymous form, or email editortips@efinancialcareers.com.
Bear with us if you leave a comment at the bottom of this article: comments are moderated intermittently by human beings. Sometimes these humans might be asleep, or away from their desks, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. You must take sole responsibility for comments you post on this site. We will take reasonable steps to weed out anything that we consider to be offensive or inappropriate.
