BlackRock is developing an agentic AI research platform, chief operating officer Rob Goldstein revealed at the firm’s recent investor day.
“We call it Asimov, and it’s used today across our fundamental equity business. This is a virtual investment analyst, so while everyone else is sleeping at night, we have these virtual AI agents, they’re scanning research notes, company filings, emails, to generate portfolio insights,” he said.
The service represents an advance on existing technology, such as Bloomberg’s recently launched document search and analysis feature, by completing tasks autonomously and reducing human intervention.
“I expect that by the next BlackRock investor day, Asimov is being used all over the firm, helping people to drive better investment outcomes,” Goldstein predicted.
The company declined to comment further on the service.
A May 2025 study by Ed deHaan, Chanseok Lee and Suzie Noh of the Stanford Graduate School of Business and Miao Liu from Boston College – Carroll School of Management found that, when the portfolios of human managers from 1990 to 2020 were readjusted by an AI analyst using public data, AI outperformed humans in 93% of cases.
In January, Bryan Zhang executive director at the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance (CCAF), and Kieran Garvey, AI research lead at CCAF, warned in a University of Cambridge – Judge Business School article that such agents could bring about ‘herding behaviour’, with many reacting to the same market signals at once and increasing the risk of volatility, flash crashes and market distortion.
“Financial institutions and regulators will need to ensure that safeguards – such as algorithmic stress tests and additional circuit breakers – are in place to mitigate these risks before they spiral out of control,” the pair affirmed.
They also added that agentic AI could open up algo trading-like capabilities to retail investors.
LSEG has also noted the rise of agentic AI, stating in a roundup of its Financial Markets Connect event that “agentic AI is becoming a core part of financial workflows, enabling smarter, faster and more autonomous decision-making across the front, middle and back office.”
