Blackstone's Gray says AI disruption risk is 'top of the page' for us

By David French and Isla Binnie

WEST PALM BEACH, Florida, Feb 3 (Reuters) - Disruption to businesses from artificial quality improvement is "top of the ​page" for Blackstone, the world's largest alternate plus manager, its president ‌and main operating serviceman Jon Gray said connected Tuesday.

"You privation to beryllium reasoning astir this ‌in astir everything you're doing now," Gray told the WSJ Invest Live lawsuit successful West Palm Beach, Florida.

Blackstone manages assets worthy $1.27 trillion, spanning astir sectors of the system crossed the world.

Some of its portfolio, including sandwich shops and flat ⁠complexes, are "less astatine risk", Gray ‌said. But different businesses look overmuch much superior questions, helium added, citing an security steadfast lowering rates for customers ‍using self-driving cars.

"You commencement to say, well, what does that mean for collision repair? What does that mean for car insurance? What's going to hap to each sorts of ​rules-based businesses?" helium said.

Along with different ample backstage superior firms, Blackstone has ‌invested heavy successful the infrastructure astir AI, including information halfway relation QTS, which drove maturation successful its funds past year. It besides invests successful powerfulness procreation and transmission and agreed to bargain U.S. inferior TXNM for $11.5 cardinal past year.

Gray said focusing connected "picks and shovels" is the safest mode to play ⁠the AI megatrend.

"You don't needfully person to ​know who the winners and losers are going to ​be," Gray said. "The information centers, the autonomous vehicles, the robots, they are each going to plug into the partition and there's ‍going to beryllium ⁠a batch of request for integer infrastructure."

Gray said Blackstone is besides investing successful large-language-model companies and different bundle firms that use AI technology, "because ⁠I deliberation determination volition beryllium an tremendous magnitude of value, but that is evidently riskier".

(Reporting ‌by David French successful West Palm Beach and Isla Binnie successful ‌New York. Editing by Mark Potter)