Leading through AI-driven disruption: A conversation with Eric Adler, CEO of L&G Asset Management

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Chantal Clavier: Hello, I’m Chantal Clavier, a partner in Heidrick & Struggles’ London office and leader of the Real Estate Practice. In today’s podcast, I’m delighted to be speaking with Eric Adler, CEO of L&G Asset Management. Before taking on his current role, Eric served as CEO of PGIM Private Alternatives, spanning public and private markets.

Earlier in his career, Eric spent many years focused specifically on real estate, including leading PGIM’s real estate before broadening his leadership responsibility across all asset classes. He’s also the chair of the advisory board of the Academy of Real Assets. Over the course of his career, he’s built a reputation for developing high-performing teams and navigating complexity, as well as delivering long-term growth. Eric, welcome, and thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today.

Eric Adler: Well, Chantal, thanks so much for having me. Really a pleasure for me to be here today. Very excited about the discussion we’re about to have.

Chantal Clavier: Fantastic. All right, well, let’s kick off. Eric, you spent much of your early career really focused and rooted in real estate, and now, of course, you’ve switched out. What made you do that?

Eric Adler: Well, I think it really starts from a fundamental curiosity I have. As I learn more about a topic and I feel more comfortable with it, fairly quickly my mind wants to wander to adjacencies, things that maybe can help me be better at whatever it is I’m doing, or areas that I think aren’t such a stretch from what I’m doing that could be interesting for me. And in many ways, the way I’ve moved through life and through my career has been that. So real estate looked like a really interesting thing to do in the mid-’90s in France. The market had been very tough, and I just thought, “Well, that’s interesting. Maybe there’s something countercyclical to look at here.”

And so I went in a bit on a lark, on a whim, and I just became fascinated with the sector. And although I stayed in real estate for a long time, if one looks at the changes I made, they had some of that curiosity and [thought] “What would it be like to look at real estate from a different angle?” I started in a very regionally specific business that was an owner/operator. I moved to a more private equity approach to real estate, then went from that to a global real estate fund manager who was also a developer, and finally landed at PGIM, which was a generalist. And ultimately, I am a generalist, but that curiosity leads to me wanting to be able to look at as many different topics as I can, and real estate’s a great business for that.

You can, if you are in a larger organization that’s global, and as a generalist, you can touch a lot of different aspects of the economic world, even the political world, through real estate. But once I was allowed to really run across real estate globally and across all sectors, that desire to add adjacency kicked in, and I had a very supportive parent who let me move into things like real assets, ultimately raising a data center fund that got us into infrastructure, and then finally gave me a little bit of a check book to move into other private alternative asset classes, secondaries private equity as an example.

And ultimately, the last piece, and definitely not the least, was the private credit piece. So that’s what led to me running the private alternative business at PGIM. And the next step for someone like me was at some point, “Well, what about the public side of things?” And that’s really what led to the L&G job. And 18 months into it, I have absolutely no regrets, and I’m so pleased I’ve done that, because again, it does take a lot of the things I learned in the private side, but it does expose me to areas that are quite different on the public side.

Chantal Clavier: Yeah. Actually, I’d like to pick up on a couple of things you just said there. So, surprises. I mean, as you tell your story, Eric, it sounds very well thought through and very strategic, very polished. Was it like that in reality?

Eric Adler: Thank you for saying that. It doesn’t feel thought through and strategic in my head when I relive my professional career. It really was a case of very intuitively moving towards things that captured my interest and seeing where it would go from there. And that curiosity, coupled with the “when in doubt, just do it” sort of logic, has led me across different regions, and ultimately across the widest possible framework within the asset management industry. But there was no plan. There was absolutely no plan. It’s one thing leading to another, and I find myself here.

Chantal Clavier: When in doubt, just do it. Love that. So you went from real estate to broader, as you’ve just described. Talk to those listening about the surprises that came within that for you because you talk about the curiosity, you talk about what clearly sounds to me, as I’m hearing you, a natural absorption, and a natural like, and as you used the word a couple times, curiosity. But what surprised you as you went from a, I suppose, from a silo—one sector—across all of those alternatives, for instance, and then as you say, from private to public and public to private?

Eric Adler: Yeah. Well, I think the first thing I’d have to say is real estate, like a lot of the private businesses, is very transactional. There’s a lot of strategy. You have to have a vision, but ultimately everything is around the execution of the transaction. And that is a very demanding but also very precise activity.

You need an entire team often working across multiple companies all on the same page in terms of timing, in terms of what the goals are, and in terms of one correct way of doing things so that you can be maximally efficient in a transaction-oriented environment where you’re competing. And ultimately, once you’ve decided you wanna make the deal, there’s a lot of creativity, but there’s a lot of pure execution.

And I think what that led to was a very precise idea in my mind of the right and wrong way of doing things. But as you start having to manage more and more teams, and you start getting involved in areas that you didn’t quote, unquote “grow up in professionally,” you have to learn to let go. But if you let go too much, it stays all very fuzzy, and the teams don’t really know how to move through the day-to-day.

They might like your strategy. They might like your vision, but if that’s all you’re talking about, that almost becomes a crutch for some of your teams. It’s easier to talk about vision than to talk about what you’re gonna do this month and then next month and how you’re gonna beat the competition in what is an increasingly competitive asset management world. So for me, that was the big surprise, how much I had to learn to let go of my absolutist belief in, “This is the way we’re gonna get this done.” You have to be more open. You have to understand enough about where you’re trying to go, but you have to give a lot of leeway to people that often know more about a specific sector than you do.

And even if you think you know as much as them, you can’t run all of these different adjacent asset classes the same way you did when you were siloed in one. So you have to trust, and you have to let them go with their gut and know when it is you can step in and when you have to accept that there are multiple ways of doing things. And I think the version of me 20 years ago, if someone had told me that I’d be that open to different ways of getting something done as I am today, I would’ve been really surprised by that.

Chantal Clavier: Hmm. Yeah. Thank you for sharing that. There’s a few messages in there, I think, for others, and we’re gonna come back to that on a personal level because it’s pretty packed full. Before we jump into that personal angle, I just wanna stay with the organizational aspect. So asset management is, you know, often associated with long-term thinking, and in today’s environment, where there’s short-term pressures, where decisions need to be made with little information, where actually the world changes minute by minute sometimes, how do you balance that?

Eric Adler: That’s the toughest part of the job in today’s world, and maybe it always was; it’s just more accentuated now. Because you have to have a long-term idea of where the business is going. We know how long it takes to break into a new asset class or into a new strategy if you don’t have the credibility of years of experience and client backing.

And so you have to have a vision. You have to know that in three or five years, this is what the overall portfolio composition of your asset management business is gonna look like. That can be within real estate, it can be within privates, or it can be across the entire asset management sphere. But you hit the nail on the head. Things move so fast today. There’s so much information out there. And also, I find a big change is that the great idea that no one else has thought of, I think there were more of them 15, 20 years ago; a new region no one had explored or a new type of asset class. I think the ground is so covered today that you can have a vision, but it’s probably not gonna have anything, at least within asset management, that no one else has thought of.

So this short-term, how do you execute more efficiently, more quickly? How do you really listen more intently to what the client is looking for? Because not only is the world around us changing a lot, but our clients are changing with it. So increasingly month by month, if you’re listening closely, what clients are asking of asset managers is changing. It’s more partner-like. It’s more all-encompassing. It has more to do not just with, “Here’s some money, here’s the strategy I want you to invest it in. Make sure the returns are good.” That is the be-all and end-all of the business, so that hasn’t gone anywhere. But increasingly, it’s about information sharing, information transfer, helping them move across a value chain, helping them gain some of the benefits that you have from working with so many different clients, and that requires a lot of very fresh thinking.

Just listen. Have a blank sheet in your head when you’re listening to a client, and be ready to move. You need to know where you wanna get in three to five years, but that short-term of knowing what you’re gonna do today, this month, next month, and for the rest of this year is more intense than ever. So that balance is probably one of the hardest parts about being a CEO today in the world we live in.

Chantal Clavier: And how do you balance that for yourself? Sounds like you listen harder and come with a blank sheet of paper. And how do you balance that then within the organization?

Eric Adler: So that’s a great question in terms of how we manage the teams, because it is very important to give that long-term vision. But I mentioned it earlier, if you’re not careful, and that’s all you wanna talk about, and that’s all you wanna pull your management team into, they’re happy to oblige because in many ways, they’re happy to give their thoughts on it, maybe propose alternatives, maybe agree with it, but all of that is gonna be easier than the day-to-day challenge of being stronger than the competition or really delivering what the client wants as well or better than other investors out there, other managers out there.

So, incredibly important to keep your teams focused on the here and now. And what that means is, you need to be able to stay fairly high level across a vast array of subjects in a role like mine, but you also need to know when to dive in. You need to know when to say, “Look, there’s 100 things we’re doing in this asset management business, but what do we really need to get done this quarter?

And how can I help the people that have to deliver that deliver it this quarter?” And that does require much more of a tactical awareness, often a, a human awareness to know where that person needs help and where they don’t—where they have it covered and you can move on. So there’s a lot of day-to-day tactics that are more important in the CEO role than I think it might have been in the past because of how fast-moving the world is and how competitive it is. But the amount of people who can, on paper, deliver the same thing that you think you’re uniquely qualified to deliver is incredible, and our clients are seeing that. They’re seeing everybody walk through the door. So that speed of reaction to what they’re asking, the seamlessness with which you can deliver it, the simplicity with which a client can work through your organization.

If they have to call three people instead of one, that might be disqualifying because they have other opportunities where they can have one person who can deliver the firm for them. So all of that orchestration is something the CEO has to be involved in, probably more so than they had to in the past.

Chantal Clavier: Where have those influences for you come from, those learnings? Because you’re clear, you’re concise.

Eric Adler: Well, I think it did help that I started in the transactional world because the piece I actually had to learn was the importance of the vision and the importance of communicating it at all levels of an organization. So the piece that’s probably most intense right now, this day-to-day “what’s the world serving up for us today,” whether that’s geopolitics, we call it geoeconomics now ‘cause it has such a quick impact on how you’re supposed to react from an investment standpoint.

What’s the latest fund offering that one of the multiple competitors out there has offered up? What is the latest M&A transaction that has completely changed the game in your region or globally? These are things that, given the private markets and started with real estate, that transactional background is something that from the beginning I was comfortable with.

How do you deal with very tight deadlines and surprises, and how do you react to them quickly and make sure everyone involved is on the same page in reacting to it? So the harder part, in many ways for me, was to learn to step back and to be able to put out a vision versus, “Well, the vision’s obvious, isn’t it?” Well, it’s not obvious. It might be obvious in my head, and frankly, as I have to articulate to others, it helps me realize, well, I hadn’t thought it through completely. But now that I have to explain it first to my management team, who are people that are my peers, oftentimes they know more about certain topics than I ever will.

They’re already running very big organizations within my overall organization in their own right. So one level is convincing them that this is the right way to be going about things. But after that, I need to take the lead along with them. I need to support them but also take the lead in finding the right way to distill that strategy across all levels of the organization.

And for me, that’s been the part that I’ve had to learn over time, and I think that parts always existed in the world of the CEO. I think this need to react very quickly to operational, tactical, competitive issues is something that’s probably newer in terms of the level of detail sometimes the CEO needs to get into, and that’s where I grew up. So in many ways, I think the way the world’s changing is more comfortable for me. The traditional CEO role was the one I really had to grow into.

Chantal Clavier: So the lean in was the natural, and the lean out was the learned behavior?

Eric Adler: Yes. Sometimes, you know, learning to stop leaning in so much has been the challenge over time.

Chantal Clavier: How did you do that?

Eric Adler: It’s a very interesting switch that goes off in your head, and you need to take a step back and say, “What do I enjoy the most?” I mentioned I was curious, but within that, you have to have some preferences. And ultimately, if you love the deal, you should stick with that, right? You need to be in that cut and thrust of getting a deal done. But as I step back, I thought, “Well, the deal is almost like exercise for me.” I liked sports when I was younger. In many ways, trying to get a deal done is a, is another form of that.

So I enjoy it, but this curiosity is really about, “Well, I wanna understand as much as I can about how the world works, the financial world.” In all humility, I stay in a very small part of the world, and what are the interconnections between them? And if I think that’s the ultimate interest to satisfy my curiosity, then everything kind of falls from that.

That means I have to step back. If I wanna be in the weeds of everything, I can’t possibly be in the weeds of that many things. So little by little, learning that what I get ultimate satisfaction from is being able to run as wide-ranging a financial business as I can, I had to step back. And what I learned while doing that was that—and I didn’t know this about myself, but I think it’s important for any CEO to have this—is that what I really like is watching an organization get better, and I don’t care how it happens. So it doesn’t matter what I do. If I can be somewhat helpful, whether that’s psychologically, morally, tactically, with a good idea, or with just leaving someone alone, or just doing the right thing vis-à-vis a client.

Sometimes it’s just hearing a client out that’s not happy. If that’s my role and all that is advancing the organization I’m working in advance, that is the ultimate satisfaction for me, and that took me a while to learn. As I was learning to step out of my weeds, ‘cause I decided I did wanna be able to do more than just real estate, what I found is, what I really love is watching the organization get better. And the ultimate satisfaction is when I’m looking at it get better and I’m not even sure what my role in it is. It’s just happening. It means I’ve really got this on the right track.

Chantal Clavier: There’s a hyphenated word that’s coming to mind as I’m listening to you, and of course, I have the added advantage of seeing you that the others don’t. And so to the audience, Eric is passionate. Eric’s hands are moving when he’s speaking. He’s smiling. There’s a lot of energy in this room just from, as he recalls and realizes, I suppose, some of his journey. But the hyphenated word, if I can come back to that, is “self-awareness.” I hear a great degree of self-awareness. When did that start occurring for you? Was that early career, mid-career, always in your life? Like, how is that so present?

Eric Adler: Self-awareness is probably giving more credit than I deserve. I think maybe it’s just humility and recognition that I’m just a person, and I’m the same person today that I was 20 years ago, 30 years ago. Frankly, if you really wanna go back, there’s people who knew me as a child, less and less of them unfortunately, as I get older, would say, “You’re still the same person.”

And I think that’s something that has always been with me. Maybe it’s ‘cause we did move around a lot when I was a kid. So I just saw many different environments, and I was just me handling it the best way I could, sometimes better than others. And so I think that humility allows me to take the focus away from myself, my navel, so to speak, and just try to observe what’s going on around me, and how can I best position myself within that to make it better? And that humility also, in many ways, is what keeps me grounded. If you think you’re more than just another person on this earth, I think that can lead to getting overwhelmed by your self-imposed sense of responsibility. I’m just gonna do the best I can with the tools I have.

And as I said, I didn’t have a plan. I’ve just moved from one thing to another. I find myself in this role. I really enjoy it. I enjoy the people around me, and I’m just doing the best I can. And in many ways, I think that allows me to be more aware, in terms of what’s actually happening around me. And also it just keeps my feet on the ground. It doesn’t over-index every action I do, and therefore it also allows me to admit when I’m wrong and change strategies. In today’s world, as you mentioned, it’s moving so fast that the idea that you can announce a strategy or announce a factual statement, “I wanna get to X by the end of the year,” and that actually happens, it’s less and less likely.

So you have to be very good at just having the humility to say, “You know what? I said that last month. It’s not working out that way. Now what? What do we do? How do I pivot? How do I iterate?” It doesn’t have to be completely irrational vis-à-vis what I said before or disconnected. It can have a logic to it, but you need to be able to admit how things are evolving and how you didn’t see that. And so in many ways, I think it keeps me grounded. It probably is a source of stress relief for me. But in this kind of very hard-to-predict world, it’s a way that I think is good as any other to try to navigate our way through it.

Chantal Clavier: You used the word “grounded” twice and the word “ground” once. Not that I’m sitting here necessarily counting your adjectives, but I use the word a lot myself, which is why I hear it from you. And again, the visual that I have with that is that anchor that sort of sits within you and stabilizes you as you go out into this sort of busy, fast-moving environment, making tough decisions, tough calls at key critical moments.

That’s a lot of pressure. It’s a lot of pressure for anybody. It’s not just a lot of pressure on Eric. It’s a lot of pressure on anyone that’s leading a business or even just a divisional team. How does that work out on Saturday and Sunday? How does that process through Eric as a human being? How do you handle that? ‘Cause it’s a lot.

Eric Adler: It is. I think the humility piece is a big part of it because it allows you not to take yourself so seriously, and therefore not to expect perfection from yourself, ‘cause I’m absolutely flawed. And thank goodness I have a great team around me to say things all the time that allow me to toggle towards the right answer. So that’s a part of it. I think, and this is maybe more controversial and not easy for everybody, but at somewhere along the line, I learned to work on a seven-day calendar. And what I mean by that is I’m able to flip in and out of personal life and professional life fairly easily.

Because it’s a pretty demanding job. Many in the finance industry are, “It’s not just a CEO job.” And it’s very hard to say it’s gonna be confined to a very specific timeframe every day and certain days of the week. So over time, I’ve gotten very comfortable with, maybe it’s a Sunday and I’ve got an idea, so that’s when I’m gonna write the e-mail, right? I might not send it ‘cause it’ll just drive certain people crazy to see it on a Sunday. But I’m able to switch in and out of it, and I’m able to sometimes just watch something mindless on TV, which, by the way, is a very important component of many of my evenings before I go to bed, is just switch off, look at some guilty pleasure, even 15 minutes.

But oftentimes, just that stepping back on a personal side, I have an idea and I’m very comfortable going back to, “Well, let’s jot that down,” or “Let’s note that for tomorrow.” So the seven-day week sounds terrible, but in many ways, in a job like this, if you spread out your personal and your professional life as flexibly as possible, you have as much time to handle both. And then there’s things that are pretty obvious. I try to get as much exercise in as I can, right? That is important.

Chantal Clavier: What’s your exercise of choice?

Eric Adler: Multiple things, and it’s because, especially during certain periods of my transactional career, there wasn’t a lot of time available. So if I got too rigid about, “It has to be this gym and at least an hour,” that was the recipe for doing absolutely nothing for months at a time. So what I’ve learned to do is whatever’s available. If there’s a pool, I’ll swim. If I can go for a run, I’ll run. If I’ve got a bike, I’ll go for a bike ride. I can do calisthenics in my room if I’ve done nothing else. So any kind of activity. Again, it’s a form of grounding. It reminds me that there’s a physical piece of me that I have to take care of no matter what’s going on in my life.

And then, breathing. Now, breathing, you can do it in a very formulaic way, but people won’t even realize. Sometimes if I’m getting ahead of myself in a meeting, I’m already thinking about the next meeting and the meeting after that, I’ll just start to breathe. People won’t notice it, but I’m actually just taking a step back, and it’s, “Okay. Be here now. You’ll deal with that thing that’s starting to work its way over in your mind. You’ll deal with that when you get there.” So that occasional just stopping myself anywhere, I don’t have to be alone in a dark room. I can do it in front of people. They just won’t notice it. So that breathing helps. All of that put together allows this to feel like a job that is actually more balanced than it might first appear in my mind.

Chantal Clavier: Love that breathing. And with that breathing, are you doing that Buddha belly breathing, Eric? Or is it again, just as you feel, there’s no technique particularly?

Eric Adler: No, no tech- the more technique, the more work that is, right? So it’s just, it’s almost, it’s less about the breathing than my mind saying, “Hold on a second. You’re getting way ahead of yourself. Just breathe.” It, that is the trigger, and then for a moment I’m still, I’m listening, but I’m just paying attention to my breath. It can last a minute, it can last five minutes, but it just settles me down again and reminds me that as long as I’m on this earth, I’ll be breathing. It doesn’t really matter what’s happening now and what I’ve gotta do in an hour, right? The whole point about the present can become, some people will push that to a much more meaningful existential thing. And it can be, but it can also be very basic. And I think I practice breathing in the most basic form, which is just breathe.

Chantal Clavier: Brilliant. Do you know, that’s a very useful piece of advice because I think you’re right. There is so much structure, so many instructions, that sometimes just trying to be more relaxed is effort, and that’s really hard work.

Eric Adler: That’s not relaxing at all for me.

Chantal Clavier: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It’s funny you say that because a couple of times, I’ve trained to be the transcendental meditation person, and I aspire still to try and get it right, and I’ve done the course twice, and the idea of 20 minutes in the morning and 20 minutes in the evening, and can you imagine how much failure that derives—

Eric Adler: Yeah. You’re—

Chantal Clavier: —for me?

Eric Adler: Exactly. That’s, that’s like my sports motto. When you ask me what I do, I do whatever’s available ‘cause otherwise I spend my time doing nothing.

Chantal Clavier: Yeah.

Eric Adler: ‘Cause my plans were too complicated for that day. So . . .

Chantal Clavier: I absolutely relate to that. Let’s shift from you to your team. You know, you’re adjusted, stable in terms of the picture you’re painting. You’re leaning out and leaning in as you need to. What qualities do you look for in the team, so, everyone else around the table?

Eric Adler: Yeah, I think the first is we have to share basic common values. And these are things that most people would probably agree with but truly knowing that this is a priority is harder than one thinks. It’s harder than meets the eye in terms of making sure everyone is focused on these basic principles, and that’s, think for the long-term.

We know these are cyclical businesses. You have to be able to ride cycles. [Be] client-first for the long-term. A true sense of ethics. A true sense of basic values, and I don’t wanna define the values ‘cause as we know, we’ve even seen in the world we live in, the definition of values changes all, all the time. But I think people that really believe in what they’re doing, they believe in what—and, and now I’m at L&G, so what L&G can deliver in the world. I, I first and foremost need a team of leaders around me who all buy into that. Because otherwise you spend your time thinking, “Well, who are we trying to be like? Who are we competing with?” That’s a classic question.  My answer is always, “I wanna be the best L&G we can be.” That’s my answer. And the definition of L&G is very hard to put in words, so you need to feel that there’s a common understanding of what that means at the most basic level. So that’s the first thing that matters.

Second is you need to be collaborative. I think that’s been the case for a long time, but things are too complicated now to think any one person can get things done on their own, and that includes across all functions within the organization. I need my leadership team to obviously have an area of expertise, but to have an interest in all parts of the business because that’s the only way we’re gonna collaborate properly, and it’s the only way we’re gonna collaborate in times that can be difficult with different parts of the business in a way that shows real mutual respect.

There has to be a mutual understanding. So those are the two biggest across-the-board things I need. I didn’t talk about a lot of the more, when you talk about skills and competencies, a lot of that’s a competency. It’s not skills per se, and we’ll get into AI, but the skills thing is gonna be interesting in the next 5 to 10 years. After that, it’s how do you pull together a truly diverse team? And when I say diverse, I mean a team that’s extremely complementary. If all I have is disruptors, that’s gonna lead to chaos. But if all I have is people that are happy to stick to a script, then that’s not gonna lead to enough out-of-the-box thinking.

And those are two obvious yin and yang kind of topics, but there are multiple dimensions of that. So really, what the overall chemistry of a team together is, that’s the key—if you’ve got the values, if everyone wants to collaborate. Everyone at these levels is smart enough. That’s not really the differentiating factor at this point. But it’s then, how do you put together a team that works really well together and they all complement each other, and frankly, back to the self-awareness piece, what are my strengths and what are my areas that I probably need some help on? I think about that a lot in terms of who I put in the leadership team as well.

Chantal Clavier: Quite right. And then, of course, everybody’s strength can often become their weakness too, if over-indexed. So it’s a delicate balance. You touched on AI, and you also touched on the skills of the future, two sort of key topics on everyone’s mind. But which aspects of the rise of AI do you believe will have, I suppose, the greatest impact on leadership over the next, I don’t know, if we talk about two years and five-year window rather than beyond, because I don’t know what that looks like at all.

Eric Adler: Yeah. So that is an incredibly topical question, and the way I’d explain the word “topical” is that if I were to overly caricature the discourse around AI 12 months ago, you would speak to people in my position, and we’d all talk about, “AI is gonna transform the industry. We have a lot of different test cases and use cases going on in our company, and it’s gonna make a big difference in our business.”

So we were very free to talk about it because it was, still felt theoretical. The advances we’ve seen at agentic AI in the last three to four months are complete game changers. And so you’re finding people talk less about AI within their organization because now we have to figure out how profoundly this is gonna impact organizations, is the question you’re asking. And I think the big challenges will be the definition of roles and responsibilities is gonna be completely changed by AI. AI is taking certain functional capabilities and giving us the opportunity to move them closer and closer to the end user, the internal end user. The end user is often the person within an asset management business or the function that’s closest to the client, and AI is collapsing that.

So if you think about how we built our organizations, and many of the asset management businesses, you have boutiques, you have larger asset managers. But generally, the way they’re organized, if someone flew in from outer space and look at it, they’d say, “Well, I kinda see the pattern. I see how things are organized. I get front office, middle office, back office. I get these things. I get second line. I get the risk framework. I get the operational team versus the deal makers versus the research team versus the, the distribution team.” All of those skills will still exist, but we have to be very open on how AI is gonna allow us to completely reformulate how they work within the organization.

So that is why we’re probably more quiet as a CEO class right now on exactly how that’s gonna look because that is a profound change. And I think you may have asked it—if not, I understood it that way—is, so how do you bring people along with that change? And that is a big part of the job today as a CEO is to be able to communicate transparently and honestly this change that’s gonna be profound for everybody.

It’s gonna change the nature of everyone’s jobs. And there are two ways to really get people on board with that. The first is probably the more, I wouldn’t call it a stick, but it’s more to say, “Look, it’s happening. AI is sector agnostic, so this isn’t specific to asset management. The entire business world and beyond is gonna be transformed by this technology. So you may as well get on the bus, and let’s do this together. Let’s learn as much as we can about where things are going. It will be valuable to you as a person, no matter what happens.” 

And we say that because what it will lead to is profound changes in certain people’s jobs, and that’s the second part that’s the hardest, and the part that is a work in progress, is this whole point about, yes, this agentic AI is gonna transform how you operate, and it’s gonna take away some of the activities that you spent a material amount of your time on. You’ll still be on it, but it’ll happen in minutes or hours instead of days, weeks, and months. So what do we do with that extra time? How do you take this skill and become more creative, be able to launch more products, be more effective in the products we have that are being run? Maybe be able to move across regions more quickly than having to open up an office because of what AI can bring to the table.

That’s the piece that’s gonna be very important in the months and years to come. Because, A, you can tell people this is inevitable. “You may as well get on the bus ‘cause the bus is moving, and it’s not even an L&G or an asset management industry bus.” But that’s not enough of a carrot. The carrot is, “Let’s go on this journey. We will discover what this means in terms of transformation of your job,” and that’s the piece that we’re still, we’re all working our way through. But that will be the key to success for asset management in the next definitely five years for sure. Probably getting the basics of that right will already start being important in the next two years.

Chantal Clavier: I think it’s right to draw the fact that people feel excitement, curiosity, and then the other end of the scale, particularly if you’re perhaps a 20-year-old, right, and you’re coming into any industry. I mean, I’ve got to say our Global Technology Services Practice is the busiest practice in our entire Heidrick business. We are digitizing every business across every sector today. So wherever this 20-year-old, for argument’s sake, is going, they’re not necessarily excited. They’re nervous. They’re anxious. They may not just be the 20-year-old that feels that way, by the way, but I’m just picking on them for a second.

Because how do they learn, and where do they get their entry role from? That might be OK for the next couple of years, but there’s a sentiment among them, “That’s sort of falling away, that’s becoming harder.” Do you see that yet?

Eric Adler: My personal responsibility as CEO of a business, to answer that question for 20-year-olds, is where I put a lot of pressure on myself. Because if I look at capabilities and mindset, if you think about the world we’re moving towards, it’s the 20-year-old that is most adapted to it. They’ve grown up in this world. In many ways it’s more of a challenge to convince the person with 15, 20 years of experience of what we just talked about. “You’re gonna have to do your job very differently. We don’t know exactly the extent of what that means, but get on the bus, move on this journey together.”

That to me intuitively should be harder. For me, the reason why the 20-year-old today feels maybe most adrift is not because of the 20-year-old, it’s because the 20-year-old is still working within organizations that aren’t AI savvy yet. And so we can’t paint to them what is the job of the new first-year, second-year, third-year analyst? How is that supposed to look? We will figure this out. I’m very optimistic on this, and there’s a little period now of flux, which can be a little bit daunting. But intuitively, the world we’re moving towards, the people coming out of university now, they’ve grown up with this. I don’t have to explain to them why they should be looking up things on Copilot and simplifying their lives. They’re doing it naturally.

So we just have to adjust our organizations, and that includes educationally, right, to what the skills are that are gonna make you successful in the future. Once we get there, I think the youth will understand that’s probably less of a switch for them than it is for a lot of the people that they’ll be reporting to, frankly.

Chantal Clavier: So talk about those skills a little. And maybe it’s those individuals, as you say, are in the organization already. What is it that they’ve got to start switching onto?

Eric Adler: I think the three things, I think it’s three, I’m just making this up as you ask the question. But I think first is everyone has to be their own little CEO in terms of understanding earlier in a career the interconnectedness between things. I think before, when you had to learn basic skills, name the skill, marketing skills, accounting skills, you can pick any number of them.

The apprenticeship of that took years. So we’re like, “Just don’t get ahead of yourself. Don’t worry about the strategy. Just worry about learning and getting better at what you’re doing.” I think the next skill is at a fairly young age, one has to be able to do a lot of what we’ve been talking about here and just say, “Well, what is the implication of something going on in Asia for my business here in the UK?” Or some discovery that happened in a different sector, how that can actually impact the asset management industry. I think the first skill is very early on being able to make connections between disparate things. I do think, no matter how good AI gets, there’ll still be a place for human intervention on that.

That’s number one. Secondly, communication skills. We’re gregarious, we’re social animals. The ability to see, feel, hear a human on the other end of, you name it, the phone or in person, is gonna be key. So your ability to project yourself in many ways, and the styles can change. It doesn’t have to be in the way people have traditionally thought. That is gonna be an incredibly strong skill. And then generally speaking, it cuts across both of these, is creativity. And in many ways it’ll be less important exactly what degree you learned or what apprenticeship you did, but are you creative? Can you problem solve? Can you really think through all the implications?

And frankly, we’re seeing that now with AI, because I mentioned earlier, AI is sector agnostic. It’s also amoral. And amoral is, I’m not judging, ‘cause that can sound like immoral. It’s not. It’s amoral. The AI, you give it a task, you create some ground rules, it will do 24-7, seven days a week at a speed no human can replicate, everything it can to accomplish that task. So if you think about even using AI as it gets more advanced, and we let it get into more and more areas of how we function, the ability to be creative about and almost empathetic. So if I tell it to do that, what are all the things it could come up with? And where are the guardrails? Where do I have to put some basic guardrails? Because with the guardrails, AI will do whatever it’s told, right? But that’s gonna take a lot of creativity. So, asking the right questions and understanding all of the potential ramifications to a sector agnostic, never turn off, and amoral just doesn’t have a morality.

It’s gonna try and deliver what you asked without any judgment to it. That takes a tremendous amount of creativity. Career paths, but also the way, what you’re educated in. You don’t have to do a finance job anymore, but something that allows you to be a creative, out-of-the-box thinker and a problem solver is gonna be important going forward.

Chantal Clavier: So interconnectedness, communication, and creativity. Skills for the future CEO, but also skills for the future professional in any workforce. Eric, I’ve loved this time together today. Thank you so much for sharing. Thank you for opening up about some of the things that are important to you actually, which was the point of coming together, more so than talking about industry per se, but really genuinely being able to share with others to help others in this complex world. So thank you.

Eric Adler: Well, Chantal, thanks so much for having me. It was a real pleasure.

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About the interviewer

Chantal Clavier (cclavier@heidrick.com) is a partner and leads the firm’s real estate sector within the global Financial Services Practice; she is based in the London office.