The distinction between Individual AI and Enterprise AI is one most firms haven't fully worked through yet. J-G Prince breaks it down in his latest post: individual tools give analysts a 20–37% productivity lift on bounded tasks. Valuable. But firm-level capability requires something different — a knowledge layer that compounds across the whole team, persists when people leave, and runs on verified data. The electrification analogy he borrows from George Sivulka at Andreessen Horowitz is the right frame: most firms have swapped the motor. Few have redesigned the factory floor. Worth reading if you lead operations, investments, or technology at an asset manager or wealth management firm. https://lnkd.in/ersSTmq9
Most firms I talk to have Individual AI. Almost none have Enterprise AI (yet). Individual AI is what happens when analysts use Copilot, Claude, or ChatGPT on their own. The research is clear on what it produces: 20–37% faster on bounded tasks: drafting, summarizing, retrieving. Real gains. Worth having. What it doesn't produce is firm-level capability. George Sivulka wrote about this for Andreessen Horowitz recently (see link in comments). The analogy he uses is electrification. When factories first got electric power, most just swapped the steam engine for an electric motor and left the floor plan unchanged. Productivity barely moved. The gains came later — only when factories were redesigned around what electricity actually made possible. We've swapped the motor. Most firms haven't touched the factory floor. Individual AI augments people. Enterprise AI encodes the firm. It's a knowledge layer built at the firm level: research that compounds across the whole team, institutional memory that doesn't leave when a senior person does, processes running on verified firm data with a full audit trail. What I keep seeing in recent conversations, across wealth managers, real estate investors, and asset managers ranging from $1B to over $1 trillion in AUM, is that the firm knowledge layer has gone from a nice-to-have to the thing everyone is trying to figure out. Mastering this will be how some asset managers will go from having 10-20% increase in individual productivity (individual AI) to increasing their AUM 5-10X without a proportional headcount increase (enterprise AI). More on this in my upcoming posts.