Social media makes AI adoption look easy. A demo, a clever prompt, someone saying they saved three hours. Ten minutes later it looks solved.
It isn't. Getting a model to actually work inside a specific firm takes time. You have to figure out what it's actually good at, where it falls apart, how it handles your data, what you'd trust it with. Usually you build a few things that don't work before you find the one that does.
Most investment professionals I talk to are interested. That's not the problem.
The problem is time.
The day job doesn't stop while you're learning this. Markets are still open. Meetings still happen. Deals still need to get done. If nobody inside the firm has the extra hours to experiment, or nobody's helping them get up the curve faster, interest just sits there.
Culture matters. But so does having someone who actually knows the investment process and has already made the mistakes on the technology side, so the firm isn't learning everything the hard way.
There's a real cost to getting good at this. The biggest cost is time.