Celebrating Six Months of Innovation and Growth as We Bring the Power of AI to Alts

It’s hard to believe it’s been six months since we officially introduced BlueFlame AI to the market on Oct. 15, 2023. When we created BlueFlame, our goal was to empower Alternative Investment Managers with the latest Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Large Language Model (LLM) technologies that would accelerate their work, seamlessly integrate their data and applications, and enhance individual and firmwide productivity, efficiency and output. We’re so proud of what our team has already accomplished and grateful to our customers who have made this possible. From rapid user growth to groundbreaking product developments and notable additions to our team, we have so many milestones to celebrate and such an exciting path that lies ahead. Here are just a few highlights.  

Revolutionary AI Productivity Tools

The AI landscape has evolved at breakneck speed over the last six months. From OpenAI’s highly anticipated inaugural developer conference to Microsoft’s Copilot update and Gemini’s somewhat rocky road, BlueFlame has stayed focused on being LLM and provider agnostic. We continue to focus on helping our clients take advantage of the most innovative LLMs and make them work for the alternative investment industry. We are constantly collaborating with our customers to introduce new features and functionality that will transform how they work, wherever they work. Here are just a few of our recent innovations and the work they empower BlueFlame customers to do:

Start your day with:

• Daily Personal Podcasts (BETA): Receive personalized podcasts containing news, email summaries, and agendas, with customizable content options like financial news or sector-specific updates, delivered via email with a narrated output link.
• Meeting Preparation Enhancements: Deploy our prompt for meeting preparation to handle other Pitchbook entities other than company and add LinkedIn as a data source. It is available for all meetings.
• Google News: Find the latest news on a given topic using Google News specific searches right from Teams or the BlueFlame AI Agent.
• LinkedIn Data Source: Access LinkedIn data in the lightning summary on a person.
  

Improve your productivity with:

• CRM Smart Tagging: Use smart tag CRM interactions directly from BlueFlame AI.
• Sending Emails in Bulk: Send draft emails to a list in bulk through BlueFlame AI.
• Meeting Scheduling from Teams: Efficiently schedule meetings and send calendar invites via Teams plugin or BlueFlame Agent.

Power your diligence with:

• Excel Add-in: Streamline complex due diligence processes and seamlessly access diverse data sources through AI-driven prompts embedded within Excel.  
• Google Search: Access the most up-to-date information from the internet, request specific data points for efficient research, and retrieve either URLs or answers directly from website content.

Defining the Path and the Right AI Use Cases for your Business

From day one, it’s been our mission to give our clients the tools they need to move from merely planning their AI journey to strategically implementing AI across their firms, and we’ve created multiple resources to help firms do just that.  

• Build your Case for AI: We’ll help you build your case for AI by sharing the five most compelling reasons why firms should consider implementing generative AI tools.  
• Buy vs. Build: We know buy versus build is a common internal debate. There are pros and cons to both approaches. Finding the right partner is critical. We recently contributed this article to Finextra that outlines the considerations for both sides to help our clients and prospects make the best decision for their firm.
• Plan your AI Implementation: We introduced an AI Implementation Checklist to give alts the framework they need during the selection and implementation process.
• Define how you will use AI at work: We shared a step-by-step guide to help firms prioritize and plan their AI journey, gave them a template to help define their own AI use cases, and shared the most common use cases for which our clients are using BlueFlame AI. It’s been so exciting and gratifying to see our clients identify new use cases that are helping them to enhance efficiency, achieve balance, and resolve existing workflow issues while preparing for future challenges, and we can’t wait to see what’s next.

Charting the AI Frontier: Partnering with the Industry

We're grateful we’ve had the opportunity to partner with several leading organizations to help educate the industry about the value of AI.  

• ACA Webcast: Considerations for Implementing AI at Your Firm: We teamed up with ACA Group to highlight the risk and rewards AI represents for the financial industry and demonstrate how firms can prepare for the impending regulatory response.  
• Private Funds CFO Network Discussion: I had a great time joining the Private Funds CFO Network for a discussion with their members on where we are with AI and automation in the Private Equity/Venture Capital industry.
• PECFOA Discussion on AI for the CFO: I was also thrilled to participate in a PECFOA Lunch and Learn Series to explore the evolving AI landscape for Private Equity and practical ways CFOs can implement AI into their operations.
• AITEC Winter Meeting: We were thrilled to attend the AITEC Winter Meeting at Stow, Vermont.  

Driving the AI Debate

Our team continues to help answer the latest AI questions and drive the industry debate, and we’ve had a great response. BlueFlame’s Head of Europe James Tedman spoke to Forbes about why it’s time to believe in AI agnosticism and how optimization, customization and resilience are three critical benefits LLM-agnostic AI solutions can deliver. Our Co-founder and COO Henry Lindemann explored how generative AI is reshaping research and decision-making processes in hedge funds with Alternatives Watch. I spoke to PE Hub about how PE firms are exploring traditional and generative AI to improve speed and efficiency and how 2024 will see PE firms actually apply AI in a useful way. I also examined how domain-specific uses of generative AI have exploded in the last year and are driving significant efficiencies with WatersTechnology.    

The Right Team to Guide Your AI Transformation

BlueFlame was built by a team of industry innovators and GRC experts who have been at the forefront of the most significant alternative investment industry changes of the last 20 years. We continue to invest in premier industry talent to ensure our clients have the industry expertise and white-glove customer service they need to make their AI plans a reality. We have tripled our headcount since our inception and are thrilled to have welcomed several amazing industry operators to our team, including:  

• Scott Barnes, Director, Client Success, who spent over 12 years at SS&C Eze (formerly Eze Software Group) performing various roles in client service.  
• Michael Donnelly, Head of Client Success, who boasts more than 16 of experience leading client success teams, including his tenure at Eze Software.  
• Justin Guthrie, Chief Financial & Strategy Officer, former COO of ACA Group who brings two decades of experience servicing the asset management industry.
• Eric Levinson, Head of Sales, an established sales and business development executive in the financial services technology sector, who most recently served as Vice President and Co-head of North American Sales at DealCloud.
• James Tedman, Head of Europe and Head of Information Security, former Partner in the cybersecurity and privacy division of ACA Group and veteran of the alternative investment sector.  
• Jim Bruno, Associate Director, Client Success: who spent over 6 years at SS&C Eze (formerly Eze Software Group) and 6 years at FIS performing various roles in client service.
• Rachel McNamara, Associate Director, Client Success: who spent over 5 years at SS&C Eze (formerly Eze Software Group) and 4 years at Oracle performing various roles in client service.
• Jasper Wu, Software Engineer: experienced software developer, who joined BlueFlame from Amazon.
• Julian Matos, Software Engineer: experienced FinTech and AI engineer, who joined BlueFlame from UBS.
• Matthew Winters, Software Engineer: experienced software engineer, who joined BlueFlame from Roots Automation.

Shaping Our Next Chapter

We want to extend our heartfelt gratitude to our customers, advisors, partners, and team for their unwavering support in making BlueFlame the premier AI partner for alts. Our customers tell us that we are more than an AI assistant; we’ve become an extension and integral part of their teams. That only comes from our unique industry expertise and experience that allows us to understand the unique business problems, workflows, systems and challenges that alts face, and incorporate the right AI strategy to amplify their day-to-day work. The past six months have been amazing – but that’s nothing compared to what’s to come from BlueFlame as we continue to shape the future of AI for our industry.