BlackRock Eyes Agent-Building for Non-Coders
Plus: Jane Street’s $1B compute deal, JPMorgan’s AI cash tool and Microsoft’s Fintool acquisition.
Hey, it’s Matt. You’re reading AI Street, where I report on how Wall Street uses AI.
NEWS
BlackRock Builds Platform to “Vibe Code” Agents
Nish Ajitsaria, BlackRock’s head of Aladdin Product Engineering, told the WSJ that AI will become the default mode for most processes, including research, coding, and operations. Humans will shift into smaller, cross-functional teams that oversee the work rather than do it themselves.
From the WSJ:
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.
Takeaway
As someone who tried and failed to learn Python like ~10 years ago, it’s pretty cool that AI is going to let us noobs spin up assistants for ourselves. Before AI, engineering resources were finite at every company, but now you don’t really have that constraint. I imagine other firms on Wall Street and beyond will let non-developers develop tools for themselves.
COMPUTE
Jane Street Invests $1 Billion in CoreWeave
From Bloomberg:
Jane Street Group, a trading firm, has taken an additional $1 billion stake in AI cloud services provider CoreWeave Inc. and plans to spend about $6 billion on the company’s technology offerings.
… The agreement will give Jane Street access to Nvidia Corp.’s Vera Rubin chips — set to come out this year — running in multiple CoreWeave data centers.
I’ll have more to say about hedge funds and market makers securing access to computing power as I’m working on a bigger piece on this trend. It’s clear that to compete in these markets, you need computing power, and lots of it. Just as speed and co-location helped determine the HFT winners and losers in the 2010s, access to compute will be this decade’s differentiating factor.
Related:
Citadel Securities Sees AI Costs Alongside Trading Benefits BBG
ADOPTION
JPMorgan’s AI Tool Anticipates Client Cash Needs
JPMorgan disclosed Smart Cash, an AI tool that moves money between checking and higher-yielding brokerage products based on predicted cash flow. The eventual goal is for AI to anticipate bills and handle budgeting without manual input. JPM flagged the deposit implication: if the tool works, it shifts idle cash out of checking and into higher-yield products, putting pressure on deposits.
CEO Jamie Dimon on efficiency gains more broadly: "Bad idea to think you're going to deploy AI and improve your efficiency ratio because everyone else is doing it too."
Citi Rolls Out AI Agent for Wealth Clients
Citigroup’s wealth unit introduced “Citi Sky,” an always-on AI agent built with Google Cloud and Google DeepMind, designed to deliver real-time market insights, prompt actions, and interact with clients alongside human advisors.
BNY: 40% of Code is AI Generated
BNY says it has more than 140 “digital employees” in production, each made up of multiple agents with roughly two dozen skills and assigned to specific workflows.
Also this week: BNY invested in Domyn, an Italian startup building AI tools for banks and asset managers. Former BlackRock executive Stefano Pasquali runs Domyn’s financial AI division.
Microsoft Acquires Fintool
Microsoft acquired Fintool. Dozens of financial AI platforms exist. Fintool is/ was the only one I know of that was benchmarked by VALS AI, a third-party evaluation platform.
Ray Dalio Creates AI Version of Himself
I mean sure, why not:
AI Job Losses Are Hard to Find
One theme I wrote about at the start of the year was that AI doesn’t take your job. So far, this prediction is holding up. You would think by now, 3.5 years into this AI boom, that there would be pretty solid evidence that AI is leading to job losses, or at very least, some evidence of job losses. But there really hasn’t been.
AI won’t trigger mass layoffs yet, Fed study says The Street
AI and Jobs: Limited Disruption So Far Morgan Stanley
AI was going to thin junior banker ranks, instead it raised the bar AFR $
ROUNDUP
What Else I’m Reading
The remarkable renaissance of high-frequency traders FT
Three Reasons AI Is Now More Reliable Than Ever WSJ
Quant pioneer Martin Lueck warns against handing over trading to AI FT
AI Pioneers Back Startup Building Models to Predict Events BBG
Trump backs AI safeguards in banking system, acknowledges risks Reuters
This Week in AI Street
FYI
I updated last week’s research piece with more specifics on money managers using AI, according to ADV data:
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CALENDAR
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