Manulife Investment Management enjoyed a head start when it began developing AI use cases two years ago. Its parent company had been at it since 2016, well ahead of most financial institutions. What the asset manager didn’t know was that a day would come — nearly a decade later — that would test those tools in real time, under pressure: April 2, 2025.
Weeks before he tore up the White House Rose Garden, U.S. President Donald Trump walked across its carefully manicured lawn and set about doing the same to global trade relations. It was “the day American industry was reborn,” Trump said. He called it Liberation Day.
What came next was a spring blizzard of temporary exemptions, product exclusions and more. As the year progressed, it was clear to investors that Trump was mostly winging it.
“It kept changing,” said Colin Purdie, chief investment officer, public markets at Manulife Investment Management. “It changed three weeks ago when the Supreme Court said no.”
That’s a reference to the court’s decision against Trump’s use of a national security statute to impose tariffs. Purdie and I spoke at the Future Proof Citywide festival in Miami last week.
We were talking about how AI is transforming the asset management business, and how Liberation Day showcased its potential.
“As an investor, it’s all about data — always has been, always will be,” Purdie said. “In the past, you really had to decide which data to focus on. What are we going to rely on?”
Last April, Purdie’s team was plugging tariff numbers into AI research tools and generating projected market impacts in real time.
“We’re talking about seconds and minutes,” he said. “Not weeks.”
Purdie told me about Christina Clark, director and senior investment analyst at Manulife Investment Management in Boston. Even as Trump was hosting his garden party, she was updating her global consumer discretionary and staples sector models. AI delivered real-time reporting on how sectors — and specific companies within them — would be affected by the new levies.
“That was her ‘wow’ moment,” Purdie said. Clark was sharing immediate analysis with the investment team while old-school analysts were still watching CNBC.
“It’s not only about having the right information and making investment decisions,” Purdie said. “It’s about your speed to market.”
I pressed him on that — whether the analysis provided to his money managers was better or simply faster.
“Better information, more quickly,” he said. “The amount of data out there — it’s just unquantifiable. Sorting through the noise is pretty impossible.”
Efficient investing in an inefficient market
Purdie is optimistic that AI offers his business something more than just efficiency gains.
“We’re going to look at trading,” he said. “We’re going to look at it from a portfolio management and portfolio construction perspective. We think we can use AI to enhance … the alpha offering as well. That’s where we’re pivoting.”
Before I could ask, Purdie emphasized that he’s not looking to remove people from the value chain. Judgment still matters. And he rejects the notion that AI will squeeze alpha out of markets.
“It’s not going to make perfect markets,” he said. “We’ve seen the rise of passive investing and algorithmic trading. That’s led to heightened volatility in markets.”
Markets will always be inefficient, even as the investing process grows increasingly efficient.