Artificial intelligence: Gateway to Wonderland

DWS's stake in Arabesque showed how asset management is moving towards AI-powered investing. Artificial intelligence, hailed as investing's next frontier, is already widespread in various forms, but its true potential in portfolio management is still far from being fulfilled. In a study on AI and finance for the Alan Turing Institute, Professor Bonnie Buchanan puts AI's "impressive" growth down to declining processing and data-storage costs, and an immense availability of data. But compared to other fields, the quantity of data or the ability to create and collect new investment data is still not sufficient, despite its abundance, according to Michael Neumann, head of AI quant investing at Arabesque AI in London. Financial data also comes with a lot of'noise', and the definition of success or failure can be more nuanced.