INTERVIEW: How Schroders is using AI for marketing

Schroders has emerged as one of the most forward-thinking asset managers on AI, overcoming potential hurdles around compliance and culture to begin deploying the technology at scale across the organisation.

Michelle Han, Global Head of Growth and Marketing, sees multiple applications for AI in the business. One is automation of repetitive or recurring tasks and in areas where people need to deal with large volumes of information and data.

Translation of content can now be automated, with humans reviewing for accuracy before the article is published. Generative AI can also be used in the creation of drafts emails and social media posts, with additional support from pre-designed prompt templates developed by internal experts.

A second major area is around audience segmentation and targeting: creating specific target audiences to tailor campaigns based on past interactions, behaviours and preferences.

Another area, she says, is around content generation and optimisation.

“I think AI is really good at idea generation – we can get AI to crawl data sources like market insights, trends, fund performance and client interest to generate or suggest ideas for content.”

The final point she raises is around data analysis and augmentation, combining Gen AI with traditional machine learning methods to improve generation of leads and score them intelligently using multiple data sources. These lead scoring models can surface leads and potential opportunities to salespeople to follow up on, or surface clients who are at risk of redemption.

“Instead of looking at a single data source like click-through rates on newsletters, can we combine different sources: from newsletters, web and social engagements, event attendance, meeting notes, flows data etc.?”

The Schroders approach

How has the firm managed to get a head start on the technology? Michelle attributes some of the success to strong buy-in from the organisation, based on the desire to innovate, manage costs, drive growth and deliver exceptional value to clients.

“I think the whole industry has been squeezed on margins and from a cost management perspective, it’s how can we do more with less. To do that, you need to embrace new technology, new ways of doing things, improve productivity, streamlining processes.”

She notes that Schroders has always had a culture of innovation, being a 200+-year-old company which has had to adapt. AI tools are becoming an important part of the investment process. Schroders Capital, Schroders’ specialist private markets business, recently launched its Generative AI Investment Analyst (GAiiA) platform, designed to speed up the screening and analysis of large volumes of data, enabling our private equity investment teams to make faster and more informed investment decisions and to focus on adding value through strategic investment activity.  

All this being true, some firms in similar positions have been slower to embrace AI.

Compliance concerns have sometimes led to a total lockdown of public tools.

Part of Schroders overcoming that challenge has been in the fact that Genie, its AI assistant similar to ChatGPT, only stores data internally.

“Any queries that we make, or any analysis that it does, are stored internally and not fed into the public domain.”

The project was led by a dedicated AI Enablement team in the firm’s established technology department, starting with a partnership with ChatGPT creator OpenAI in late 2022.

Following the internal set up, and creation of guidelines, it was then made available to all employees in April 2023. Michelle says that an individual needs to invest time on using an AI tool to really understand how to use it in a way that will help improve efficiency and productivity.

“I think it was quite progressive for the CEO to say I want to empower every employee with an AI assistant so that we not only think about how we change how we do our work, but also start innovating and generating new ideas.”

In some ways, she says, this approach also considers the likelihood of people  who will use AI anyway.

“Even if we didn’t have Genie, our employees are still going to dabble with AI in their own time. So, to circumvent the risk of our data going external, [we provided] an approved tool that employees can use. I think that’s an even better risk mitigation measure.”

The culture of innovation

Of course, there is far more to making this work than simply providing the right technology. There are cultural and organisational aspects too to realising the full benefits of AI.

“I think the biggest factor around AI is change management, and that can be quite a big hurdle to overcome because change is always hard and there are so many change projects happening at the same time that there’s only so much people can absorb.”

With Genie, Schroders has introduced multiple forums that allow people to share use cases, as well as educational webinars and learning modules on how to use AI and how to prompt. Currently, there are a substantial number of AI projects across the firm involving people from across the organisation.

“The more we share use cases, the more employees will see how their peers and colleagues are using AI to save time and produce sharper output.”

“I think there is a fear of the unknown, but once you’ve done it and invested time to learn about it, people start using it in ways beyond what you can imagine.”

Looking ahead into the future, Michelle wants AI to free up human capacity to spend time on more strategic initiatives: providing “golden nuggets” of information to help inform the best way to engage with clients and support our clients’ investment needs.

Key to underpinning this is a robust data strategy.

Michelle says that the process needs to start with having the discipline to capture data accurately. This needs to be followed by data quality and the governance around it.

The data infrastructure and making sure that data is modelled in a way that AI is able to access is also important, she adds.

So where can firms get started immediately?

“I think a good starting point are the projects that can deliver very quick wins: those that are able to realize cost savings and productivity gains quickly. So, anything that you can automate quickly. Translations is an obvious one because we spend so much money with translation agencies who in turn use AI tools as well – so why not bring the AI in house?”