Norway wealth fund CEO says it is using AI to deploy capital

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Results for Norway's Oil Fund at 2022

Norway wealth fund CEO Nicolai Tangen presents the results for 2022, at a news conference in Oslo, Norway January 31, 2023. NTB/Heiko Junge via REUTERS/File Photo Acquire Licensing Rights

NEW YORK, Nov 8 (Reuters) – Norway’s $1.4 trillion sovereign wealth fund is using artificial intelligence to help manage its investments, its CEO Nicolai Tangen said in an interview at the Reuters NEXT conference in New York.

The fund invests the Norwegian state’s revenues from oil and gas production in equities, bonds, property and renewable projects abroad.

It is the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund, holding stakes in more than 9,200 companies globally and owning 1.5% of all listed stocks.

“We are using it (AI) now in how we deploy the capital,” Tangen said.

“We use it to reduce the trading we do, because we are an index-near fund, and sometimes we have to make adjustments to the portfolio and these type of models can help us trade less.”

Tangen said he had set the fund an internal target to boost productivity by 10% over the next 12 months by using AI, and had discussed the move recently with Sam Altman, the CEO of artificial intelligence company OpenAI.

“I asked Altman: ‘I think we can increase our productivity by 10% in the next 12 months … what do you think?’,” Tangen said, adding that he had plucked the 10% figure “straight out of the air”.

He said Altman told him: “I think 20%, you can do.”

The fund is also urging the 9,200 companies it invests in to engage with AI but to do so responsibly, unveiling a set of expectations on the issue in August.

The fund has said it would concentrate particularly on the healthcare, finance and large tech sectors, because their use of the technology will have an especially strong impact on consumers.

Companies must also be able to explain why they are developing particular AI systems and how they have been designed, trained and tested, the fund has said. There should also be effective human oversight and control.

To view the live broadcast of the World Stage go to the Reuters NEXT news page: https://www.reuters.com/world/reuters-next/

Reporting by Lananh Nguyen in New York and Gwladys Fouche in Oslo; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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Lananh Nguyen is the U.S. finance editor at Reuters in New York, leading coverage of U.S. banks. She joined Reuters in 2022 after reporting on Wall Street at The New York Times. Lananh spent more than a decade at Bloomberg News in New York and London, where she wrote extensively about banking and financial markets, and she previously worked at Dow Jones Newswires/The Wall Street Journal. Lananh holds a B.A. in political science from Tufts University and an M.Sc. in finance and economic policy from the University of London.

Oversees news coverage from Norway for Reuters and loves flying to Svalbard in the Arctic, oil platforms in the North Sea, and guessing who is going to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Born in France and with Reuters since 2010, she has worked for The Guardian, Agence France-Presse and Al Jazeera English, among others, and speaks four languages.



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