Blackstone Created an AI Chief Investment Officer, Which Is Trained on 14 Years of the PE Firm’s Internal Deal Memos and Debates

Every Monday, Blackstone's top partners meet to decide what the world's largest alternative asset manager will buy next. Nearly every deal on the agenda now arrives with two memos. The deal team writes one. The other comes from a model the firm calls its AI chief investment officer.

Bloomberg reported the arrangement last week in a profile of Blackstone president Jon Gray. The model was trained on data that includes more than 14 years of the firm's internal deal memos and committee debates. It weighs in on proposed investments, but it has no vote.

Plenty of investment firms use AI to find companies or speed up diligence. Blackstone is the first big buyout shop we know of to give a model a standing role in the meeting where the money gets committed.

What We Know About the Model

Not much. Bloomberg's account runs a few sentences, and Blackstone hasn't said which underlying model it uses or who built it. "Trained on" could mean the firm fine-tuned a model on its archive, or that the model pulls from those documents as it writes, or some combination.

Those details matter. A model that has read the memos on deals Blackstone walked away from, and on deals that lost money, will argue differently from one that has only seen the deals partners liked. Bloomberg also says "nearly every" investment gets an AI memo, which leaves open which ones don't.

Ten Years of Building Toward This

The AI CIO has a long backstory. Steve Schwarzman started hiring data scientists after Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma explained AI to him on a bus stuck in Beijing traffic, Institutional Investor reported in 2023. By then the firm employed more than 50 of them, some working directly on deal teams. Martin Brand, who runs North American private equity, told the magazine his team could build a first model of a company while he was still on the phone with the banker pitching it.

Blackstone's in-house platform was also drafting first-pass investment memos in a few hours, work that usually took junior analysts two or three days. Chief technology officer John Stecher said the drafts weren't perfect but gave teams "a solid baseline to work off."

In September 2025, Gray told a gathering of institutional investors that every investment committee memo now had to address the deal's AI risk within its first two pages, for credit deals as well as equity. This year Blackstone folded its growth investing business into a new AI unit, Blackstone N1, and co-founded Ode with Anthropic, an AI implementation firm, with Anthropic and Hellman & Friedman.

Much of the internal work falls to Rodney Zemmel, who joined Blackstone last year after nearly three decades at McKinsey. Bloomberg reports he spends close to 60% of his time on AI and oversees two groups, one building investment tools for Blackstone and one working with its portfolio companies. He also sits on Ode's board.

Why the Committee Matters

Blackstone runs more of its decisions through one room than outsiders might expect. Gray told Semafor in August that the firm is more centralized than its size suggests, and that he spends weekends reading memos before the weekly committee meeting. He has little patience for partners who show up unprepared. "If you haven't read the materials, then you're not even a player," he said.

Gray also said he has trained himself not to speak first, and that colleagues are encouraged to challenge teams even when their track records are strong. He admitted AI has made those meetings harder, since nobody can say with much confidence what a billable hour or a software company will be worth in a few years.

A model that reads every memo and never tires of objecting fits that culture well. The catch is that everything it knows comes from Blackstone's own history, which is exactly what Gray wants his partners to keep questioning.

Rivals Mostly Use AI Earlier in the Process

Other large investors lean on AI too, though mostly at the front end. EQT has run its Motherbrain platform since 2016. It ranks potential investments with scores dealmakers can inspect, and the head of AI at EQT Ventures told Tech.eu last year that language models now surface past internal notes on a company or founder before anyone takes a meeting. Carlyle gave its deal teams sentiment reports on target companies and later rolled them out to all of its investment teams, according to the analytics vendor SESAMm.

EQT is the closest comparison, since both firms are mining their own institutional memory. The difference is where that memory gets used. At EQT it helps decide which companies are worth a look. At Blackstone it shows up when partners decide whether to write the check.

Several Blackstone competitors, including Apollo, Goldman Sachs, General Atlantic and Leonard Green, are also investors in Ode. Ode works with portfolio companies rather than on its backers' own deal processes, but it puts the same expertise within easy reach of all of them.

The Open Questions

A second opinion is only worth having if it's independent, and there are reasons to wonder whether this one always will be.

Researchers at Rutgers and the University of Toronto found this year that language models asked to rate stocks tend to adopt any analyst rating included in the material they're given, with herding scores often above 90% (ACL 2026). A single planted contrary rating was enough to shift the answers of leading commercial models. If Blackstone's AI CIO reads the deal team's memo before writing its own, it may agree more often than it should.

Then there's the matter of what it learned. Fourteen years of memos teach a model how Blackstone partners argue. Whether they also teach it which arguments turned out to be right depends on whether deal outcomes were part of the training, and Blackstone hasn't said.

Accountability is murkier than the no-vote rule suggests. If the model flags a risk that partners overrule and the deal goes bad, limited partners may want to know how that warning was handled. Keeping 14 years of internal deliberations in one system also raises the cost of a breach. Some financial advisers were already uneasy about the security of Blackstone's AI efforts in 2023, Institutional Investor reported.

A Seat at the Table, but No Vote

We found no other major buyout firm that has publicly described an AI with a standing role in its investment committee. Whether others copy the idea will depend on evidence Blackstone hasn't released, mainly how often the model disagrees with its deal teams and whether it has ever swayed a vote it can't cast.