Agentic AI delivers most when grounded on shared data

Whether AI agents compound value across the firm or fragment into new silos comes down to what they sit on. SimCorp built the shared foundation first: one data layer, one orchestration platform, one interface, one notification layer. Because every agent draws on the same foundation, each one makes the others more effective within a shared, governed foundation. The first agents are already live with clients today, with the full ecosystem deploying through 2026.

How to determine whether AI agents compound value or create new silos

For the front office, the value of AI comes down to how quickly and confidently a good idea can be acted on.

As firms scale their use of AI, many are focusing on how to apply agents where they can deliver the most immediate impact across investment workflows. The approach your firm takes to deploying AI across the investment lifecycle ultimately determines whether agents compound value or create new silos.

Adding agents to existing workflows can improve individual tasks, but when the underlying systems are not fully connected, coordination across workflows remains limited, and the context must still be re-established as work crosses from one system to the next.

The real opportunity is to establish a connected foundation across the firm, where each agent makes every other agent more effective.

Get the foundation right and every agent compounds

The order decides the payoff. Start with the agent a business unit wants and build backwards, and each agent inherits the disconnection it was meant to solve. By contrast, putting the shared foundation in place first enables agents to operate within connected workflows from the outset. That is why SimCorp builds the foundation before the agents, on four core elements:

• A unified data layer anchored in the Investment Book of Record (IBOR), so all agents read from the same positions, exposures, and history.
• An orchestration layer so agents pass context to each other automatically, without manual handoffs between systems.
• SimCorp One Neo: the conversational workspace embedded within investment workflows, where teams can ask, analyze, and act in one place instead of switching between tools.
• A proactive notification layer, so the platform surfaces the right task to the right person at the right time.

Governance is built in from the start. Every agent action is traceable, and humans remain in the loop at every consequential decision point. The orchestration layer also enforces permission boundaries, so agents can only act on data the user is authorized to access. Together these controls make AI deployable at scale in a regulated environment.

The agents that investment teams interact with today are a direct expression of this architecture. Agents inherit a connected system, rather than replicating the disconnection they were meant to solve. And, because every agent draws on a governed foundation, investment teams can configure workflows, thresholds, and escalation rules to match how their organization actually operates. Best practice lives at the platform level; differentiation happens at the final mile, where each firm's risk appetite, client commitments, and operating model are distinct.

See how this ecosystem injects efficiencies through a typical portfolio manager’s day.

Figure 1: Neo is the single conversation investment teams use. IBOR, data orchestration, and governance run underneath, unseen. Portfolio management, risk, compliance, and operations all sit on that unified foundation.

A traditional portfolio manager’s day

Most firms have already connected individual workflows. Positions, risk, compliance, and execution each run their own checks, and data moves between them without manual re-entry. What still doesn't travel is the knowledge behind it: the portfolio manager carries the context, the changes, and the reasoning from one step to the next. Adding AI agents to this workflow can speed up individual steps. But because each system still works from its own copy of the data, the portfolio manager is still the one holding it all together. Expertise that belongs in the decision goes into assembling the inputs first.

Agentic AI delivers real value when the data and context behind it are understood and shared from one consistent source, turning each step into a simple review rather than something to work out manually. Here's what that could look like across a portfolio manager's day.

A portfolio manager’s day, reimagined

Here is what each of the portfolio manager’s daily steps looks like when the architecture underneath is already unified.

The same governed foundation extends beyond the front office

A shared foundation only proves its worth if it holds up across the entire firm. Functions that have traditionally run on their own timelines and versions of the truth, inherit the same coordination the moment they connect to it. What changes is not just speed, but where human judgment gets spent: less on assembling the picture, more on interpreting it.

Faster reporting cycles
Financial reporting has historically been one of the most time-intensive cycles in the back office with teams manually working through each line item against prior-year statements before any commentary can begin. SimCorp’s Accounting Commentary Agent speeds up this process. It analyzes prior-year financials and produces a structured first-draft commentary across the full statement set, so accounting teams begin at review not a blank page. The cycle completes faster, with outputs produced inside a controlled workflow that reflects analyst judgment and preserves oversight.

Get instant answers from cross-portfolio insights
Investment analysts increasingly carry responsibility for views that cut across systems, time horizons, and asset classes. The Insights Hub Agent gives analysts access to that breadth in natural language, returning answers and ready-to-share visualizations without writing SQL or routing requests through the data team. Every query draws on the same IBOR data as the Portfolio Management and Risk agents, so answers stay consistent across teams.

A foundational ecosystem that compounds agentic value

As the broader ecosystem continues to evolve through 2026, each new agent extends the same governed foundation further across the investment process, connecting systems and workflows that were never designed to work together. The time between a new risk idea and a validated, settled trade will compress even further, with every step traceable and every decision point retaining human oversight.