Millennium employees are getting to know a whole new batch of colleagues.
Izzy Englander’s $97 billion hedge fund is offering every employee, including investment staff, a “Digital Twin,” a personalized AI assistant who continuously learns from the employee’s working style. The firm already has 1,600 AI coworkers invisibly working across Millennium’s ranks, and it’s now making them available to all 7,000-plus employees in a move to further embed AI into its workforce.
Millennium employees who choose to have a twin can email with them much like they would a colleague, Diana Meditz, the firm’s AI product manager, said in a Q&A in a blog post announcing the program. The twin interacts only with its employee, remembering their preferences and handling repetitive tasks, like research, meeting preparation, and inbox management.
Twins aren’t clones or extensions of employees, and can’t make decisions on their behalf. Rather, they have their own identity, email addresses, permissions, and audit trails, Meditz said in the Q&A. Employees grant their computerized counterparts access on a system-by-system basis, and “guardrails ensure the twin only interacts with its dedicated employee, and its memory, files and workspace live in its own dedicated environment.” Meditz said her twin reviews overnight AI news and scans her inbox for relevant internal updates every morning before 6 am.
Vlad Torgovnik, the chief information officer, was the first person at the firm to adopt a digital twin to test how well the concept works. Millennium then scaled up to a pilot group of more than 150 twins; in that first cohort, 97% of employees interacted with their twin each day, the blog post said. Every new hire now gets access to a twin upon joining.
Now that the firm has twins in place, it’s working to scale AI teammates, which are built for an entire team. Like the twin, the teammate has its own identity and operates autonomously within set boundaries. The firm’s announcement comes amid broader interest in and awe of AI agents — since Meta released Muse, its new personal AI agent, earlier this month, it’s climbed to the top of Apple’s US App Store.
Hedge funds have long pursued machine learning and have more recently poured huge sums into AI systems to help their investment teams. Millennium has also invested heavily in AI talent, launching an AI track for its internship this year and building an AI laboratory to develop cutting-edge technology and lure top technical minds, per Bloomberg. The firm also announced a partnership with Anthropic last month to co-build an “AI-powered digital risk analyst,” which will support its risk management teams and is part of an effort to “deploy Anthropic’s most advanced models across teams.”
As expensive as the AI efforts can be, Millennium is in a good spot to finance them. On October 1, it will close on $22 billion in new capital commitments.
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