BlackRock founded AI Labs last year to begin researching artificial intelligence for potential product offerings; the team is now comprised of 30 data scientists working on projects including a next generation stock lending platform; AI has already helped the firm to better handle massive but messy data sets and is allowing them to work on alternative data more efficiently; BlackRock is not alone in their quest to use AI, other firms like Franklin Templeton and Pagaya have also been researching and testing strategies to build better, more efficient process. Source.