MSCI and Google Cloud to develop AI to identify climate risks and opportunities

MSCI has announced an expansion of its partnership with Google Cloud to accelerate the development of generative AI solutions for the investment industry, providing clearer insights into portfolio and enterprise risks and opportunities involved with climate change.

The solutions will be powered by Google Cloud’s generative AI platform, Vertex AI, and climate technology including BigQuery Geospatial and Earth Engine.

“The AI revolution has led to rising expectations among companies and investors, who want faster access to higher-quality data, analytics and actionable insights,” said Henry Fernandez, chairman and chief executive officer at MSCI.

“Expanding our partnership with Google Cloud will help MSCI address these needs while keeping us at the forefront of advanced data technologies. It will also help us provide new solutions for investors working to decarbonise their portfolios.”

The partnership will focus on three key areas: First, MSCI and Google Cloud are working together to leverage Google’s generative AI technologies to help investors measure and manage portfolio exposure to climate risk and identify low carbon investment opportunities, making it easier for investors to identify, synthesise and communicate the broad range of climate exposures across asset classes.

MSCI are also combining their proprietary data and analytics with Google Cloud’s generative AI to provide an overview of portfolio and enterprise level risk. This could significantly reduce the time clients need to analyse and arrive at actionable insights, and help portfolio and risk managers synthesise and rapidly act on significant volumes of risk signals from their portfolios with greater ease, while also fostering greater collaboration between risk and portfolio management teams to build more resilient portfolios.

Finally, Google Cloud’s gen AI will power MSCI’s new conversational AI solution for its portfolio and risk management solutions. This capability is designed to use natural language processing to simulate human language and generate responses that can enable clients to quickly answer questions and surface information about their portfolios and MSCI data, models, and solutions.

“Generative AI is driving the next evolution of financial services as investment professionals look for better and faster ways to monitor portfolios, generate new insights and scale the speed of decision-making,” said Thomas Kurian, CEO at Google Cloud.

“Our partnership with MSCI to build generative AI-powered solutions will not only help risk and portfolio management teams better collaborate and unlock insights, but also will enable MSCI’s clients to build more climate-resilient portfolios.”