The announcement of the pilot program was made in a memo to Aladdin staff sent on Dec. 14 by Tarek Chouman, managing director and global head of Aladdin client business, and Kunal Khara, managing director and head of Aladdin product.
It comes a week after the $9.1 trillion firm laid out its approach to generative AI in another staff memo.
Chouman was formerly the CEO of eFront, which BlackRock acquired in 2019 for $1.3 billion in cash.
The eFront co-pilot – which is essentially a superpowered chatbot designed to turn users' written questions into customized data visualizations – was built using Azure OpenAI services and, according to Chouman, is the first of several more iterations to come, including an upcoming Aladdin co-pilot, which Chouman said will be the firm's "marquee offering."
Chouman said the rollout of the private preview comes after the eFront co-pilot was tested extensively within BlackRock, but will still be refined before its full release based on user feedback. The ten preview participants are all volunteers.
"They raised their hand to be a part of this small club, we didn't force it on them," Chouman said of the clients, adding that there has been an influx of inbound interest about BlackRock's AI capabilities.
"Our innovation capability started quite early. When our peers, our competitors, are launching press releases about what they are going to do (with AI) in '24 and '25, we are delivering the system," Chouman said. "So why is that? It's simply because we started earlier. It's not because we went too fast, or super quickly — just that we started earlier."
BlackRock CEO Larry Fink has spoken widely about his enthusiasm about the transformational potential of generative AI. BlackRock launched its AI Labs in 2018 and has 100 AI professionals in various departments across the company, though Chouman stressed that all of the firm's employees are using AI. "Everybody has AI on his or her desk," Chouman said.
Chouman added that there is a firmwide buzz about the launch of the co-pilots and other AI capabilities.
"You cannot imagine the level of excitement we have in the firm … we are so, so excited at the idea of our users using it," Chouman said. "It's like a cook who has created a recipe for a new cake — we are keen to have people coming and tasting our new cake."