Decoded: AI News for Alternative Assets
Beyond silicon, into substance
The AI news ecosystem is a funny, cyclical place. Big number>bigger headline>more engagement>more resharing>wait for an even bigger number>repeat. Specifically, this month was dominated by news of bigger gigawatts, bigger compute deals, bigger capex and bigger valuations. Those who read between the lines were rewarded with some smaller but equally important developments towards actually operationalizing AI.
Here’s what we found interesting this month:
Google lets users take their hands off the wheel
The News
Google made their first major step into agentic browsing by adding a Gemini assistant directly within their Chrome browser. Two days earlier, they launched a new Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) that lets AI agents make secure purchases on behalf of individuals
The Translation
The new Chrome release allows users to ask for information or analysis about a webpage without opening Gemini separately (or another LLM…). This first release also offers basic integration with native Google apps like YouTube, Maps, etc. The big deal here is their plan for a true agentic browsing assistant. This means AI will be able to take action and execute multi-step tasks ranging from ordering groceries to booking a vacation
Separately, the AP2 protocol enables AI agents to prove they have permission to make payments, ensures requests reflect user intent, and builds in accountability through traceable audit trails. The protocol has major backing from very large & reputable companies in the payments & banking space.
The So What?
What I personally love about AI is it is now forcing us to ask questions about how we go about our lives and how we go about our work. Nearly every day I ask myself why do I do X this way? Why not another way? Let’s explore this chain of thought:
I like to think that we are living in the era of efficiency, and with each iteration of AI and each reflection of “why”, we come one step closer to STP’ing our lives.
With that said, why not.. AI-executed payments? Let’s pretend I receive a legal invoice every month. They are fairly consistent but I do a sense check before instructing my team to initiate the wire in a separate payments platform. This is how it would work in an agentic framework leveraging AP2:
I’m intentionally oversimplifying here… but recognize that we are going through a fundamental shift from AI systems that recommend actions to systems that can execute autonomously. Why not join in?
Wall street meets main street (with AI as the matchmaker)
The News
On the heels of relaxed U.S. policy, Goldman Sachs & T.Rowe Price tie up to draw retail wealth and retirement savings into alternative funds. In separate but related news, a new crop of technology providers have emerged to support this “retailization” of alts.
The Translation
Goldman and T. Rowe are just one example of the alts to traditional fund partnerships which seem to be in vogue for 2025. We also have Legal & General + Blackstone, BlackRock + Partners Group, Vanguard + Wellington + Blackstone, amongst others..
These partnerships share similar threads – new wrappers for old assets, high-scale distribution, liquidity engineering, and risk optics. Oh and fees, let’s not forget about the fees.
To support these new marriages, new AI-powered firms are building the infrastructure and front-end gateways where funds and their fun-sized investors will come to do business. Solutions range from curated product selection & distribution, data extraction & aggregation, KYC / AML and real-time reporting.
The So What?
This is a significant ecosystem shift forces managers to transition from opaque models optimized for a small pool of institutional investors to a high-scale, high-transparency model suited to us normal folk. More accounts, more transactions and more exceptions will stress all parts of the operating model:
These are questions we may not have immediate answers for but we can make some pretty safe assumptions about what they imply in terms of technology:
There will be competitive opportunities and pressures on both the top- and bottom-line. Those who not only ‘adapt’ but truly transform their operating model to be data-first, AI-enhanced will be best placed to win.
Quick Hits
What You Need to Know
Replit achieves “full self-driving moment” for software development
What Happened: Agents can not only code, but can autonomously handle complete dev workflows from ideation to deployment
Our Take: We don’t use Replit directly (this is a sponsor-free newsletter) but it’s clear that custom tool development just got a whole lot more economically viable. Rapid prototyping, testing and deployment should prompt you to look at workflows you previously deemed “juice not worth the squeeze”. If your roadmap and time-to-ship looks the same in 2025 as 2024, you’re probably doing something wrong…
Open AI’s honesty moment
What Happened: OpenAI admits hallucinations will never completely disappear.
Our Take: Hallucinations were long ago (like a month ago in AI-scale) thought of as a solvable bug which will go away with more training. Now it’s clear that eliminating them completely is fundamentally unavoidable (as is 100% accuracy). Risk management protocols and human-in-loop need to be pillars of any AI use case, at least until LLMs stop incentivizing guessing in training.
CFO remain ever skeptical of AI….rightfully so?
What Happened: CFO surveys show a similar distrust in Agentic AI as shown with Generative AI two years ago.
Our Take: Lack of control, unclear ROI and unreliability are totally valid concerns…but watching from the sidelines is not the right answer. In practice, implementing AI is more like an operational transformation than it is a technology project. And like any large transformation, baby steps will are key to bringing your team on the journey. Pick something safe, something measurable, and something that will start building trust.
Is AI “workslop” destroying your productivity?
What Happened: Low-value AI generated work looks great but is often a pointless drag on productivity
Our Take: With a shiny new kit of productivity tools in hand, knowledge workers are skipping the knowledge and putting out work for the sake of…work? Why give my colleague a concise, well-thought 200 word analysis when I can ask AI to spit out a beautiful, 15-page research paper in 2 minutes? HBR put the solution more eloquently than I could – “indiscriminate imperatives yield indiscriminate usage”. It’s your job as a leader to both set the rules and the tone for AI usage.here to stay.
The billion dollar AI gym membership
What Happened: Major AI players are investing heavily in reinforcement learning environments where agents can learn complex, multi-step tasks under real-world conditions.
Our Take: As our AI agents grow stronger, they will eventually need a gym upgrade. Think of my legal fee example earlier and how much more confident you would be if those agents were to do job training on a full calendar year of invoices and accounting entries in their source systems. Sounds good, right? Unfortunately, this new training methodology is heavy, expensive and currently limited to big tech. Expect costs to come down to a point where this would be a more feasible option for fund managers.
The Numbers That Matter
72%
Portion of AI models in production that fail within 12 months due to poor data pipelines Garbage in, garbage out. The best AI in the world can’t fix bad data architecture.
Jargon Decoder
Demystifying AI Terms
Vector Embeddings
What it means: Representing text, images, or data as numerical coordinates so AI can “search by meaning”. Like mapping every deal term sheet into a single multidimensional database of comparables.
Prompt Injection
What it means: When someone tricks your AI by hiding malicious instructions in seemingly normal input. The AI equivalent of social engineering attacks.
The Gut Check
This Month’s Question
About Aithon
Aithon Solutions delivers intelligent automation and data solutions purpose-built for investment management operations. Our proprietary technology seamlessly integrates with existing systems to enhance operational efficiency, improve reporting accuracy, and unlock deeper business insights. By combining domain expertise with applied AI, we help asset managers do more with less—adding new products and clients faster while driving better outcomes through reimagined processes.
Learn more
Now this newsletter is not a sales pitch but let me quickly introduce you to Aithon. We are a group of former leaders in the Alternatives space who spun-out a new venture aimed at solving old world problems with new world solutions. We cut our teeth in the middle and back-office so that is where most of our solutions and this newsletter will focus. Not that a front-office chat bot isn’t great, but we personally get more excited about how to turn a 2 week close process into a 2 day process, or how to get actionable insight from untapped operations data. Anyways…the purpose of this newsletter is simple – to clarify the opaque, to spur thought, and to hopefully inspire you to take the plunge into the world of AI (the water is warm, we promise).
Happy reading!
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