Man Group, one of the world's largest hedge funds, is seeing big gains in the productivity of its research process through the deployment of agentic AI, according to Antoine Forterre, who serves as the company's chief financial officer and chief operating officer.
Speaking at an industry conference in London, Forterre said the company has been using various types of artificial intelligence for more than a decade, but the recent development of agentic AI has been a game changer. "We are tremendously excited about the potential both as a source of efficiency and for alpha," he said.
Man Group manages more than $225 billion in assets for investors and trades in more than 870 markets around the world. The company is known for its quantitative approach, which relies on sophisticated data analysis to identify investment opportunities. In its annual report for 2025, the company said it invested more than $135 million in its AI, data and technology capabilities, and evaluated more than 220 new data sets to expand the potential sources of investment returns.
Forterre, who was speaking to an audience of brokers and exchanges at the FIA International Derivatives Expo on 17 June, explained that the use of agentic AI "can tremendously accelerate the research process" and the ability to deliver investment ideas for the company's portfolio managers.
He described how the company has trained agents to operate as quantitative researchers that sift through 40 years of data to find "predictors" of investment performance. These agents operate alongside human researchers, accelerating the identification, implementation and evaluation of investment ideas.
Man Group also uses agents to sift through various types of information related to the companies in its investment universe and distill that information into a small set of key questions. The process still has "humans in the loop" but it cuts the amount of time required for this type of analysis by 80%, Forterre said.
Forterre said the firm also is exploring ways to use agentic AI to streamline its operations, both internally and in its relationships with brokers, custodians and other parts of the market ecosystem. In the next several years, he said he would like to see agents deployed to remove "cumbersome paper shuffling processes" that are embedded in middle and back-office functions.
Like many large hedge funds, Man Group relies on a large number of brokers to execute its trades. Forterre mentioned that in 2025 the company's trading volume reached $9 trillion across all asset classes worldwide, and of that amount, nearly $4 trillion was in exchange-traded futures and options. That level of trading volume generates a huge amount of interactions with brokers and clearing firms, creating a significant opportunity for automation.
Earlier this year Man Group announced a partnership with Anthropic to harness its Claude AI model for its "alpha generation" process. In a press release, the two companies explained that Man Group will leverage a combination of its proprietary technology platform and Claude’s ability to operate "between raw datasets and investment decisions" – accessing data through code execution, then summarising and synthesising insights for use by portfolio management teams globally.
"For example, using Claude, investment teams can analyse a significantly wider universe of securities and their associated financial risk models, ad hoc communications and textual information processed through automated reports and agentic AI," the companies said in the announcement. "This will free time for core activities including company modelling, security selection and portfolio construction."
