- The Shift Brief
- Posts
- Less Chatbots, More Plumbing
Less Chatbots, More Plumbing
The Shift Brief | Week of March 10th, 2026
Ryan Erickson
March 10, 2026
We're at InvestOps in Orlando this week. One thing stands out reviewing the agenda: the most interesting sessions aren't about flashy AI tools or chatbot demos. They're about operating models, data transformation, and workflow automation.
For those unfamiliar, InvestOps brings together investment operations leaders at asset managers, including COOs, heads of investment ops, and technology leaders responsible for the infrastructure supporting portfolio management. Sessions tend to cover data pipelines, reconciliation, reporting, regulatory processes, and the systems connecting research, trading, and operations across a firm.
Themes such as future-proofing the investment operations model, accelerating digital transformation, and modernizing data infrastructure appear again and again on the agenda. That says something about where the industry actually is right now.
Most investment firms don't lack analytics platforms or market data. They have Bloomberg, FactSet, research portals, and internal systems. What they struggle with is the operational layer connecting them. Email threads, documents, research notes, approvals, and reporting processes still move through fragmented workflows that were never designed to work together.
A lot of the sessions here focus on middle- and back-office transformation: data pipelines, reconciliation automation, operational efficiency, and system integration across the investment lifecycle. It may not sound as exciting as the latest AI announcement, but this is where real productivity gains actually happen inside investment organizations.
The more I look at the agenda, the clearer it becomes that the industry's biggest challenge isn't access to AI. It's modernizing the operational infrastructure sitting between people, data, and decisions. AI may help accelerate that shift, but the underlying problem is far more about operating models than algorithms.
More observations and takeaways from the event next week.
~Ryan Erickson, Founding Executive