Abby Barlow on Running a Solo Family Office with Claude
Westwood Management's Abby Barlow replaced junior analysts and 60-tab Excel sheets with Claude. Here is her four-step enterprise context method.
AI in the Investment Office – Abby Barlow, Laura Hill, Brian Sugrue, Jenny Heller, John Lawrence, Matt Bank, Kristin Kallergis Rowland, Jon Webster (EP.515)
With Ted Seides, Abby Barlow, Laura Hill, Brian Sugrue, Jenny Heller, John Lawrence, Matt Bank, Kristin Kallergis Rowland, Jon Webster · Sunday, September 20, 2026
Ted Seides interviews eight chief investment officers and senior allocators—ranging from solo single-family offices to multi-billion-dollar sovereign and pension funds—about how artificial intelligence is transforming the modern investment office. The allocators share practical use cases including document synthesis, internal software development, investment memo stress-testing, and red teaming, while debating the boundary between automated workflows and irreproducible human judgment.
Key takeaways
- Abby Barlow ran Westwood Management as a sole investment professional for three years without hiring junior staff by deploying Claude as a dedicated virtual analyst. Read more →
- J.P. Morgan Asset & Wealth Management tracks $250 billion in alternative assets by applying autonomous agents directly to unstructured documents, from private placement memorandums to bespoke side letters. Read more →
- Matt Bank revealed that GEM flipped its software budget within twelve months, moving from 90% third-party tools to 90% in-house software development. Read more →
- Jenny Heller at Brandywine Group Advisors built an internal operating model that moves AI adoption past sandbox experiments into core allocator workflows. Read more →
- Jon Webster leads artificial intelligence deployment across 2,000 investment professionals managing $580 billion at CPP Investments on behalf of 22 million Canadians. Read more →
- Allocators are establishing strict internal lines against using machine learning tools to write investment memos, treating memo writing as cognitive labor that produces the investment edge. Read more →
6 articles from this episode
J.P. Morgan's $250B Playbook for AI Due Diligence
Kristin Kallergis Rowland explains how J.P. Morgan tracks style drift and red teams fund managers across $250 billion in alts.
Why Allocators Are Replacing Commercial SaaS With In-House Code
Matt Bank and John Lawrence explain why endowments and foundations are abandoning third-party software to build in-house tools and data lakehouses.
Jenny Heller on AI Trust Layers for Investment Offices
Brandywine Group Advisors CIO Jenny Heller outlines a three-layer trust framework for integrating AI into allocator operations and diligence workflows.
Why CPPIB Automates IQ to Capture EQ in Deals
Jon Webster explains how CPPIB deploys AI across $580B in assets to stress-test memos and why quantitative analysis is commoditizing.
Why Top Allocators Ban AI From Writing Investment Memos
Institutional allocators Laura Hill and Brian Sugrue set hard boundaries on AI: automate data ingestion and red teams, but protect memo writing.
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