Anyone hoping there will be more jobs at the world’s largest pension fund will have to look elsewhere, as artificial intelligence has eliminated the need for Norway’s $1.8 trillion Government Pension Fund Global to hire more people—at least for now. However, if you’re a sentient AI robot, you might be in luck.
Nicolai Tangen, the CEO of Norges Bank Investment Management, which runs the GPFG, said in a speech before the Storting (Norway’s parliament) that the sovereign wealth fund does not plan on growing its workforce. Instead, he said, NBIM will “focus on increasing efficiency through technology.”
The firm already had a significantly smaller workforce in 2024 than 2023. According to NBIM’s annual reports, it had 676 employees at the end of 2024, more than 37% fewer than the 1,079 employees the manager reported at the end of 2023.
Tangen said, ”AI can help us” to “trade in the smartest possible way so that we can also trade as cheaply as possible.” He said NBIM launched a pilot project in August 2023 that uses AI to anticipate changes in the benchmark index.
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“We have built a model that predicts which stocks we trade a lot in,” Tangen said. “This requires large amounts of data, and machines are better than humans at analyzing this. The savings in trading costs amount to several hundred million kroner.”
Tangen said the fund aims to be “at the forefront of the financial industry” in its use of technology and artificial intelligence.
“We still know little about how finance will be affected by the race in artificial intelligence,” Tangen said. “But I am absolutely convinced that it will give us an enormous advantage going forward that we in the fund have been early adopters of this technology and made it a natural part of our work.”
Tangen said the company also uses AI to scour a large amount of data and thus use better information as a basis for decisionmaking when evaluating companies.
“We have almost 9,000 companies to monitor,” he said. “The goal here is not primarily to save costs, but to become better and smarter at collecting and compiling information.”
He also said the fund’s use of AI has made it more efficient in the way it gathers information about companies from news articles written in more than 16 different languages. It also uses AI to analyze companies’ responsibility and ESG policies, a task made far more manageable by the technology.
“Before, it took us days to get an overview,” Tangen said. “Now it takes 10 minutes. Artificial intelligence makes us both more efficient and better at the job we do, and we are just at the beginning.”
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Tags: AI, Artificial Intelligence, Government Pension Fund Global, GPFG, NBIM, Nicolai Tangen, Norges Bank Investment Management, Norway, Sovereign Wealth Fund
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