The system uses more than 14 years of Blackstone’s internal investment memos and committee debates to produce a separate assessment of potential transactions. It takes part in the investment review but has no vote, Bloomberg reported in October.
Every Monday, Blackstone President Jon Gray and the firm’s senior partners meet to evaluate potential transactions. Nearly every investment under consideration now comes with two memos: one prepared by the deal team and another generated by the AI chief investment officer, Bloomberg reported.
The AI’s assessment becomes part of the committee’s regular review, giving executives another perspective before they decide.
The AI chief investment officer cannot approve or reject investments. That authority stays with the firm’s executives.
Gray’s investment committee is central to Blackstone’s decision making. He spends weekends reading deal memos before the weekly meetings, and the firm fosters a skeptical culture in which doubters can question a deal even when the team behind it has a strong track record, he told Semafor in August.
AI Already Cuts Blackstone’s Weekend Deal Reviews to Minutes
The AI chief investment officer sits on top of tools Blackstone’s deal teams already use. Reviewing thousands of deal documents “used to be a weekend-long activity” and now takes minutes, Chief Technology Officer John Stecher said in a May interview Blackstone published. Private equity and real estate teams use tools that turn raw deal documents into financial models more quickly, and AI screens incoming deal flow so the firm can reject opportunities faster, he said.
Those tools come from a team of data scientists working on investment intelligence, one of two groups under Rodney Zemmel, Blackstone’s global head of portfolio operations, who told Bloomberg he spends nearly 60% of his time on AI. His second group, an applied AI team, works with portfolio companies.
That second effort runs through Ode with Anthropic, an AI services firm Blackstone formed with Anthropic and Hellman & Friedman and announced in May. Blackstone planned to bring Ode to 25 of its more than 270 portfolio companies, with Ode engineers already working at six of them, PYMNTS reported in August.
Financial Firms Run AI in 27 of 75 Tasks but Keep the Final Call
Blackstone’s no-vote rule matches what large enterprises expect from AI. Between 80% and 85% of executives say AI will augment human decision-making over the next five years rather than replace it, and none expect full autonomy, PYMNTS Intelligence found in its May report, “Financial Services Pulls Ahead in the Enterprise AI Race,” which surveyed 60 senior technology executives at U.S. enterprises with at least $1 billion in annual revenue in March.
The report also found that financial services and insurance firms have reached high adoption, meaning at least half of firms use AI for a given task, in 27 of the 75 tasks the report tracked. Many of those tasks sit where outcomes can be checked. Revenue recognition leads at 65%, and credit risk assessment reaches 60%.
Blackstone’s Monday meeting follows the same pattern. The AI writes the second memo, and Gray and his partners still make the call.
