Norway's Wealth Fund CEO demands AI adoption among employees
Nicolai Tangen, CEO of Norway's $1.8 trillion sovereign wealth fund, is mandating AI adoption among his 670 employees. He believes AI is crucial for efficiency and future career prospects within the fund. Despite initial resistance, Tangen is implementing various initiatives to encourage AI usage, aiming for significant efficiency gains in the coming years.
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Chief executive officer Nicolai Tangen sees no future at Norway's $1.8 trillion sovereign wealth fund for employees who resist using artificial intelligence in their jobs. Tangen, who recently told lawmakers in Oslo that the technology can help keep the fund's headcount from growing in the near future, says he has been running around "like a maniac" since 2022 to convince his roughly 670 staff to use AI. "It can't be voluntary. It isn't voluntary to use AI or not," Tangen said in an interview. "If you don't use it, you will never be promoted. You won't get a job," he said, referring to Norway's wealth fund-the world's biggest.Artificial intelligence is rapidly becoming a prerequisite for performance in the asset management industry as investment firms race to boost efficiency, cut costs, and gain an edge in decision-making. In that vein, AI tools are being embedded across trading desks, research teams, and back-office operations.While some question the consequences of hastened adaptation of AI, the 58-year-old leader of Norway's wealth fund is mostly worried about his employees not using it enough.In his home country, Tangen is known to sing the praises of AI on every stage, and in every podcast and seminar he attends. Inside Norges Bank Investment Management , it's the same. "You have to repeat and repeat and repeat, attack the organization from all sides," he says. There's now a six-person "AI enabler" team, 40 AI ambassadors and repeated seminars, conferences and courses. About 300 staff now write code, with the help of AI, according to Tangen. "My biggest surprise was that resistance when we first started. People don't want change," he said."There's 10-20% who don't want do things if it's voluntary. But those are the ones who need it." In an internal survey, the fund's employees reported a 15% increase in efficiency last year. Tangen said he believes number will be 20% in 2025 and another 20% the year after that.This gives the CEO a visible boost. His face lights up, his voice grows louder.'If we compete with companies that are not using AI, we're 50% ahead! It's unbelievable. They will never catch up,' he says. 'I've never seen anything like this, a situation where you can get this far ahead of your competitors.''We save a lot on trading and will save much more,' he said, quoting trading costs, putting money into the markets and on the general increase in efficiency. Key tools used at the fund include Claude, built by Anthropic PBC and 'used by 100% of the employees,' Copilot by Microsoft Corp, Perplexity, Cursor, Open AI Deep Research and Google AI.The fund monitors news articles about its investments in 16 different languages and structures the information to get an overview of the companies' accountability, spending minutes on something that used to take days, Tangen has said.NBIM, as the fund is known, is far from alone in telling staff to embrace the change — Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke told his company in April that AI usage is now a baseline expectation and JPMorgan Chase & Co. CEO Jamie Dimon has said the firm's more than 400 use cases of AI are likely to grow to 1,000 in a year.The Norwegian sovereign wealth fund is owned by Norges Bank and operates along guidelines set by the Norwegian finance ministry. Its mandate is decided by Norway's lawmakers. That does set some boundaries on the use of AI, Tangen said.There's a requirement to have 'humans in the loop,' and two people have to look at any code that is sent out. Staff cannot input personal or classified information or disclose active trading in AI models, and the fund won't use AI on independent trading or in hiring processes.'Independent trading is always done by humans. I don't see that changing for the fund in the future. But they use AI to gather information,' he said, adding analysts are no longer of much use.The fund owns about 1.5% of all listed companies around the world and is tech-heavy, with Apple Inc., Microsoft, Nvidia Corp, Alphabet Inc, Amazon.com Inc and Meta Platforms Inc among its biggest investments, in line with a bespoke benchmark index.It's also known to be an activist investor, publishing its voting decisions five days before the companies' annual general meetings. It famously voted against Tesla Inc. CEO Elon Musk's record $56 billion compensation package that's since risen in value and been contested in court. AI helps the fund making these decisions, Tangen said.'The documents about the pay packages might be 40-50 pages long. We feed that and our guidelines into the system and our voting history on previous pay packages, and it tells us, with about 95% accuracy, if we should vote yes or no', the CEO said.Tangen said he will replace employees who leave, but only with tech-savvy new ones. Employees should use the time saved with AI to 'think more and make better decisions,' he said.
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