InMarketing Today

Institutional investors, the pension funds and endowments that have always backed private equity's traditional decade-long funds, are now putting money into evergreen vehicles Blackstone and KKR built for wealthy individuals. Blackstone's head of wealth, Joan Solotar, told the Financial Times that institutional interest has grown over the past year; KKR's head of client solutions, Eric Mogelof, said the firm recently launched institutional share classes in its buyout, credit and infrastructure evergreens to meet what he called “growing demand.” Analysts warn the shift could unwind the industry's traditional closed-end fund model.

For years, institutional investors accepted a decade-long lock-up because that was the only product on offer, not because they preferred the illiquidity. The moment a more liquid alternative appeared, they moved. It is a reminder that market segments are often an accident of what was distributed to whom, not a genuine preference gap, and once a better-designed product turns up, yesterday's “loyal” institutional base can behave exactly like retail.

Test whether your flagship product's features would appeal to an adjacent audience if positioned differently, and watch for competitors building a more liquid or more transparent version of what you sell today. If they do, do not assume your existing client base will stay put out of habit.

Chris Churchman, the Goldman Sachs partner who leads the bank's Marquee platform, warned on an internal podcast that relying too heavily on AI models risks giving bankers “cognitive atrophy” and stripping their ability to reason from first principles. Much of Wall Street's expertise, he said, is tacit knowledge passed on by junior staff shadowing senior risk-takers, not written down anywhere a model could absorb it. Goldman is still hiring roughly 2,400 to 2,500 interns this year, even as chief executive David Solomon has said headcount growth will “contract a little” over the next three years.

Every firm marketing “AI-powered” efficiency to clients and staff is implicitly promising that judgement gets sharpened, not replaced. Churchman's warning is a reminder that the pitch, AI makes your people better, and the practised reality, AI can make your people passive, can pull apart quickly. A senior leader saying so publicly does more reputational work than any capability page ever will.

Do not let your AI messaging outrun your AI governance. Pair every rollout with a visible mechanism, shadowing, review, a sign-off step, that keeps a junior person doing the reasoning rather than just checking the model's output. That mechanism doubles as evidence that your “AI-augmented” claim is real.

Search strategist Benu Aggarwal set out a three-layer framework for what she calls AI discovery: brands must first be eligible, crawlable, structured and machine-readable, before they can earn recommendation by giving AI engines reason to trust and cite them over competing sources. She points to Cloudflare's finding, reported in June, that bots now account for 57.5% of HTML requests on its network, overtaking human traffic for the first time.

The most useful idea in the piece is the “mention-to-citation gap”, brands an AI system mentions often but rarely cites as a source. That gap is a trust problem: the model knows you exist but does not treat your own content as the best evidence for a claim about you, usually because your facts, pricing, positioning, leadership, are stated inconsistently across your website, listings and other sources.

Audit where your brand's core facts appear online and make sure they say the same thing everywhere: your site, your structured data, your listings, your press materials. Corroboration across your own channels is now a prerequisite for being cited, not just for being found.