Artificial Intelligence for Asset Management and Investment

Chapter 7Deployment

THE DEPLOYMENT PART PLAYS A CRITICAL role in an AI-centric transformation and includes two distinct groups. The deployment department is headed by an executive who is responsible for the technical deployment of all the artifacts developed in the previous stages (Noh, 2016). While the role can be viewed as the traditional CIO role, the best person to lead the deployment unit is one who has a broad understanding of systems, infrastructure, and information technology. Note that the emphasis is on technical deployment of artifacts and not the strategy deployment in the investment process. The investment strategy deployment—which covers how to test strategies in the production environment, determine the strategy life cycle, allocate capital and other such details—will be discussed in the next chapter. This chapter only covers the technical deployment.

AI artifacts are a new addition to the corporate technological assets and artifacts. In the last several decades, we have collected multiple layers of IT assets: the ancient legacy systems (mainframes), the more modern ERP and CRM type business software, analytics and reporting layers, data storage (for example, databases, data marts, and large data warehouses), data centers, data lakes, cloud, networking infrastructure, security, Extract Transform Load (ETL) technologies, and several other components of corporate IT infrastructure. On top of the base architecture we have deployed applications, processes, and analytical ...