AI & Finance Innovation Internship
AI & Finance: Understanding Today. Exploring Tomorrow.
This unique internship is about understanding how finance works today, understanding how AI is beginning to change it, and then thinking about what we should build for the future.
We will look at three areas of finance:
- hedge funds
- private equity
- commercial real estate
Johan Tellvik will personally mentor the students throughout the internship across all three areas. Johan has more than 35 years of experience working across hedge funds, private equity and commercial real estate, with experience across Asia, Europe and the United States.
That experience is an important part of the internship. You will not simply be reading about these businesses and trying to understand them from a textbook. You will be able to discuss what you are finding with someone who has actually worked across these different parts of finance and can help you understand how they operate, how they differ and where the real opportunities and problems are.
Phase 1
We will start by understanding each vertical on its own. How does a hedge fund work? How does a private equity firm find and evaluate investments? How does a commercial real estate investor identify, underwrite and manage an investment? We will look at how each business makes money, how decisions are made, what processes are involved, what information is required and where people are spending their time.
Phase 2
We will then look at the AI solutions that exist today and how they are being used across these businesses. What has already changed? Where is AI actually being integrated into the workflow? Where are existing solutions useful, and where do they still fall short? We will compare what is available with the actual needs of each business.
Phase 3
The final stage is about looking forward. Once you understand the businesses and have a good understanding of what AI can already do, I want you to start thinking about what is missing. What could we build that would make one of these businesses more efficient, improve decision-making, remove unnecessary work or create a completely new way of doing something?
That gives the internship three clear areas of discovery:
- Where are we today?
- What AI solutions exist today?
- What should we build for the future?
The fact that we are doing this across three different verticals is very deliberate.
Most people develop an understanding of finance from one perspective. They become a hedge fund person, a private equity person or a real estate person. I want you to develop an understanding of all three. That gives you a different perspective.
You may see something happening in private equity and recognise that a similar opportunity exists in commercial real estate. You may see an AI solution being developed for hedge funds and realise that the underlying technology could be applied somewhere completely different. You may discover that the same fundamental problem exists across all three industries but is being handled in very different ways.
You are developing the ability to look at finance from multiple sides and understand the connections between them. We believe this is a significant competitive advantage for you.
Not your typical internship
This is also why this is not a typical internship. You are not going to be sitting in an office being given a task, completing it and moving on to the next task. You will be working with students from across the United States and with students studying different subjects and coming from different backgrounds.
You will be working in teams, with different teams focusing on different parts of the research and discovery process. Your job is to understand, investigate, question, compare and eventually develop ideas about what could be done differently.
There are no predetermined answers that we are expecting you to find.
We are looking for students who are genuinely interested in understanding how finance works. Students who are interested in AI and what it could change. Students who like to explore a problem rather than simply follow instructions. And students who are willing to think beyond what already exists.
At the end of this internship you will be able to have a deeper understanding how hedge funds, private equity and commercial real estate work. You will be able to explain:
- Here is where we are today.
- Here is what AI can do today.
- Here is what I think we should build next.