Invesco President and CEO Andrew Schlossberg explains why AI belongs at the center of a firm’s strategy, not on the sidelines, and how his team is using it to cut a 25-step client onboarding process down to five.
As AI reshapes what investors expect from their advisors, asset managers are under pressure to move faster without breaking the trust that took decades to build. In a recent podcast conversation, Invesco President and CEO Andrew Schlossberg laid out how his firm is putting AI directly into employees’ hands, why he refuses to treat it as a separate strategy, and what 30 years in asset management have taught him about consistency.
25 Steps Down to 5: How AI Is Rewiring Institutional Onboarding
One of the clearest examples Schlossberg gave was operational, not theoretical. Onboarding a large institutional client, he said, can involve roughly 25 steps between the moment a client agrees to do business and the moment their money is actually being invested — a process heavy on manual hand-holding that Invesco has “been trying to reengineer for a long time.” The goal, in his words: take it “from 25 steps to five,” using a mix of AI and traditional process engineering. On the investment side, he pointed to a harder, more emotional decision — knowing when to sell — where generative AI tools are being used to strip out some of the emotion and give fund managers “another set of eyes” to challenge their own calls.
Why AI Tools Went to Every Employee, Not Just the Top
Rather than mandating AI use from leadership down, Schlossberg said Invesco put the tools “in the hands of every employee” and let some of the best use cases emerge bottom-up, from people rethinking how they personally work. His framing: resist the urge to make AI adoption “completely top down and controlled,” but also resist making it “completely bottom up and entrepreneurial” — the job of leadership is constantly finding the balance between the two. “Trying to protect people from themselves is the wrong way to come at it,” he said.
“Don’t Have a Separate AI Strategy” — Make AI Part of the Strategy Itself
Schlossberg’s central strategic argument is that AI shouldn’t sit apart from a company’s broader plan. “Don’t have a separate AI strategy; have a strategy for AI that enables your broader strategy,” he said, arguing that clarity on this point makes it easier to say yes or no to individual AI initiatives, since they’re evaluated against the same intent as everything else the firm does.
The WebMD Effect: Clients Now Show Up With a Self-Diagnosis
Asked how AI has changed client behavior, Schlossberg drew a direct comparison to consumers self-diagnosing symptoms online before a doctor’s visit. Investors, he said, increasingly arrive at conversations already believing they know what they should be doing with their portfolio — sometimes correctly, sometimes not. “They also show up with some of the wrong diagnoses, to torture the analogy, so we have to spend time reeducating,” he said. Even so, he argued the shift is net positive: demand for advice and product, he said, has “only” gone up, not down, as clients get more informed.
25 Years at One Company, and a Leadership Style That Had to Change
Schlossberg has spent 30 years in asset management and 25 of them at Invesco — unusual tenure, he noted, “especially in my generation.” Stepping into the CEO role required a deliberate shift in how he led: from being purely collaborative and consensus-driven to being “equally decisive.” He described rebuilding a new leadership team in his first six months around a simple ordering — “team first, then ‘my area’ second” — to break down what had been a siloed culture, then rewriting strategy and simplifying the org design around that principle.
Two Career Lessons: “Slow Down to Speed Up” and Get Comfortable Being Uncomfortable
Asked what shaped him most on the path to CEO, Schlossberg pointed to two pieces of early mentorship. The first — “slow down to speed up” — he defined as being a genuinely good listener: asking questions, not presuming you already have the answer, and trying to be the last person in the room to speak rather than the first. The second was learning to walk into situations where he wasn’t the expert and lean on people around him rather than avoiding the discomfort.
The Trust Rule: “Sometimes People Want to Declare Trust, But No, It’s Earned”
Asked directly how trust is built and kept in his industry, Schlossberg didn’t hedge: “Once you lose a client’s trust, it’s very hard to ever earn it back.” He described clients who still reference something that happened 15 or 20 years ago because it involved their money or their sense of the firm’s integrity. His stated rule for himself and the company: be consistent, own mistakes, don’t chase trends, and don’t deviate from the process clients bought into in the first place. “Once you break that consistency, or you’re not forthcoming, it’s over,” he said.
Looking Ahead: Being the Bridge Between a Traditional and a Modern Asset Manager
Asked what he wants his tenure to be remembered for, Schlossberg framed his role as a bridge — carrying forward Invesco’s long-standing principles of long-term investing, integrity, and investment quality, while modernizing around AI, more dynamic markets, digital assets, and a more international footprint. “Not being faddish, and blending the modern with the traditional, that’s what I want to be remembered for,” he said.
This piece is based on a recorded conversation between Eric Kutcher and Andrew Schlossberg.