Are asset owners to blame for robot RFP responses?
Asset managers are turning to AI to provide the prompt, individually tailored responses to RFPs that assets owners and consultants demand (Mohamed Nohassi/Unsplash)
Good morning. Many of us may have become used to having an AI assistant offer to help write an email or draft an, ahem, article (that offer for help is strongly refused here at AOX).
But do many asset owners feel they are communicating with AI bots when they receive RFPs?
Increasingly, the answer is yes, sort of.
Research by Cerulli Associates (which focuses on the US, as a caveat) shows 81 per cent of institutional sales and service teams at asset managers use AI to generate and refine RFP content.
Among that 81 per cent, the most common uses of AI for RFP teams are: automating responses (80 per cent), efficiently searching content libraries (53 per cent) and speeding up due diligence questionnaire responses with AI-generated suggestions (53 per cent).
Agnes Ugoji, an analyst at Cerulli, said: “Asset management firms maintain an extensive repository of responses, historical submissions, regulatory language, and product data.
“As the volume of RFPs increases and product offerings expand, the way in which content libraries are structured and used can either accelerate or delay a team’s response rate.”
Why are asset managers doing this (other than, presumably, the prospect of saving money on employing human beings)?
According to Cerulli’s survey, it’s all the fault of asset owners.
“As institutional asset owners and consultants demand increasingly customised, data-driven and time-sensitive responses, RFP teams face mounting pressure to provide prompt individually tailored responses. A key opportunity for improvement lies in content management,” the survey says.
To be fair to these asset management companies, they are still using human beings to make sure they are not accidentally sending nonsense in RFPs.
One head of institutional distribution told Cerulli: "You need to get on board with AI and the changes, or you'll get left behind. However, there is still human oversight needed to ensure the information is correct… we may need to change the title of RFP writer to RFP quality control."
What do asset owners think about this? Well, I spoke to one who was yet to be convinced.
He pointed out that many asset owners and their consultants are using AI to help with qualitative and quantitative analysis.
He said: “The (likely) outcome is that some managers and owners push AI usage to limits, which will lead to responses that are practically indistinguishable from one another, overconfident and at the same time compliance/legally constrained to the point of saying nothing useful at all.
“Some asset owners will also probably be tempted to expand the use of AI to do more and more of the important evaluation and assessment pieces.
“Optimised responses will be interpreted by an optimiser, both sides attempting to ‘game’ the outcome. It’ll turn into that line from Friends: ‘They don’t know that we know they know we know!’. But so much less entertaining for all involved.”
