Man Group CTO eyes ‘significant impact’ for genAI across the fund

Man Group CTO Gary Collier said on Wednesday that he foresees generative AI “underpinning” whole workflows at the firm, starting with nascent areas such as time-series analysis in the quantum systematic space, before expanding to cover other areas, complementing its existing AI copilot, Alpha Assistant.

Speaking with Bloomberg’s global head of enterprise data product Tony McManus at the Bloomberg Enterprise Data & Technology Summit in its London office earlier today (April 17), Collier said that while it might be difficult to square generative AI-based solutions working within the quantum systematic space at first sight, he sees a range of potential uses.

The language that we use is copilot, not autopilot—or letting the machine make all of the decisions. Broadly, we’re talking about copilots augmenting humans

Gary Collier, Man Group

“You could take the view that it’s not really applicable to the quantum systematic space, but if you take a step back and look across the entire value chain of everything from hypothesis generation, dealing with data, and easy interfacing into code and into data, it’s a binding agent,” Collier said. “There have been use cases of generating synthetic time series. I see [genAI] very much underpinning the entire process.”

Collier said that while some technologies such as blockchain fall into the “high-hype, low-impact” quadrant, generative AI sits at the intersection of “high-hype and high-impact” technologies, and is already making a significant impact.

“One of the interesting things about genAI is that for the first time, something that is at the leading edge of tech is not wholly in the domain of quants,” Collier said. “There’s loads of interest in use cases across discretionary and other parts of the firm as well, which you may not have thought of as wanting to be at the cutting-edge of tech. So it very much is, I think, more than anything we’ve seen in at least recent history, an enabler. And that’s novel.”

Collier explained that Man Group’s internal “North Star” is a proprietary copilot called Alpha Assistant, which helps the firm’s quantitative research team by minimizing the amount of menial work that quants need to perform, so they can pursue higher-value tasks. When WatersTechnology spoke to Man Group’s head of data Hinesh Kalian earlier this year, he described how the firm was using Alpha Assistant to summarize actionable insights from datasets and process them into models for use in portfolio construction.

Collier suggested that another potential use case for genAI at Man Group could be using a summarization feature to reduce its legal team’s workload by condensing large bodies of work into information that can be presented in a more readable format. 

However, the process for integrating new technology into Man Group’s existing tech stack is based on stringent analysis, and Collier is being careful.

“The language that we use is copilot, not autopilot—or letting the machine make all of the decisions,” he said. “Broadly, we’re talking about copilots augmenting humans. I think if you look at it through that lens, you’re naturally inclined to put the right guardrails and the right level of trust in the technology.”

Collier said he views genAI not as a knowledge engine, but as a reasoning engine. The technology is still prone to making high-profile mistakes due to its ability to “hallucinate” facts, either through incorrect input data or a lack of specific data.

“It’s not this font of all accurate knowledge—it’s good at reasoning—it’s good at binding things together—be that data or code,” he said.