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Why Getting Asset Management Employees On Board with AI Requires More Than a Rollout Plan

Industry firms are investing billions of dollars in technology upgrades, but how they engage employees when rolling out new tools can make the difference between widespread buy-in and rank-and-file resistance, industry executives and consultants say.

Many firms are focused on keeping pace with the latest technologies. Franklin Templeton, for example, in November announced a partnership with Wand AI to deploy agentic artificial intelligence across its platform.

AI -based tools can add another layer of difficulty, because staffers who are resistant to adopting them often have rational concerns, said Patrick Conroy, a vice president at STP Investment Services.

“Employees who do not understand how an AI system makes decisions, or who bears accountability when it is wrong, are not being obstructionist. They are being prudent,” Conroy wrote in an email. “Firms that address this directly, by building human oversight into the workflow rather than layering AI on top of existing processes, consistently see higher adoption and fewer quality failures downstream.”

Read more about what Pat and other subject matter experts had to say here.

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State Street to ‘Imminently’ Launch Internal AI Agent Factory

State Street will “imminently” launch an internal bot factory to build agentic artificial intelligence agents for internal use, the firm’s chief financial officer said Wednesday.

The firm already deploys standardized AI agents for research and analysis across the company, CFO John Woods said during a presentation at the Morgan Stanley U.S. Financials Conference. But the new “agentic platform and factory” will allow staffers to create customized AI agents, he said.

“Those customized agents won’t exist in a vacuum,” Woods said. “We’re going to be embedding agentic capabilities in an end-to-end process view.”

The initiative is part of a broader transformation of State Street’s operating model, through which the firm plans to embed AI capabilities directly into day-to-day business functions, Woods said. The custom agents will likely be rolled out through the second half of 2026 and into 2027, he said.

A State Street spokesperson declined to provide further details.

Woods’ remarks are notable because they suggest State Street has the ability to build AI agents at scale, said Pat Conroy, head of strategy, product and innovation at STP Investment Services.

“The word that matters in Woods’ remark is not ‘agent,’ it is ‘factory,'” Conroy wrote in an email. “State Street is describing the means of production, which moves the story from what an agent can do, to who has the resources to own the assembly line.”

Read more on what STP’s subject matter expert, Pat Conroy had to say here.