Investment Operations teams are the backbone of asset and investment management firms. Their day-to-day work not only enables portfolio managers to respond swiftly to market events but also ensures that complex, unstructured data flows seamlessly across the organization.
In this talk, we introduce a modular, Kubernetes-native AI framework purpose-built to scale custom Knowledge Apps across the enterprise. Designed with speed, flexibility, and compliance in mind, the framework empowers teams to launch production-grade document extraction applications in minutes instead of months, unlocking new levels of automation and efficiency for investment management workflows.
We’ll also share how this framework has helped BlackRock streamline document extraction processes, generate investment signals, reduce operational overhead, and accelerate the delivery of high-impact business use cases—all while maintaining the robustness and control required in a regulated industry.

00:30 Introduction to BlackRock's AI Initiatives
01:31 Classifying AI Applications
02:22 Use Case: New Issue Operations
03:59 Challenges with Scaling AI Knowledge Apps
07:02 Architecture of BlackRock's AI Framework
08:32 Demonstration of the Sandbox
15:52 Key Takeaways from the Discussion

Vaibhav Page
Principal Engineer

Vaibhav is a Principal Engineer at BlackRock, where he leads the development of the Data Science and AI platform powering
investment research and automation across the firm. Vaibhav is also the author of Argo-Events, a CNCF-graduated project widely used for event-driven automation in cloud-native environments.

Infant Vasanth
Senior Director of Engineering

Infant Vasanth leads the engineering team responsible for the Studio Compute Platform, BlackRock's analytics and automation platform that enables our users to conduct research & analysis, run automations and distribute research at scale.
In addition, Infant is also leading the Data & AI Acceleration team focusing on efforts to enhance Aladdin Studio's AI capabilities along side the Operational AI capabilities(prospectus analyzer, operational agents etc.)

How BlackRock Builds Custom Knowledge Apps at Scale — Vaibhav Page & Infant Vasanth, BlackRock