Why one Johannesburg founder thinks every asset manager will have its own AI agent

Ask a portfolio manager how much of their week goes into reading and most will give you a number that sounds too high.

Research notes, filings, earnings calls, internal emails, market data: the volume keeps growing, while the time to act on it doesn’t.

Built specifically for each firm

Mpho Montsho thinks the answer is AI agents built specifically for each firm, rather than general-purpose tools, and he has spent the past few years building them.

Montsho, who lives in Johannesburg, is co-founder of Techbridge Innovations, a US-based software development house, where he leads product, operations and the delivery teams.

His path there ran through some of South Africa’s and America’s best-known institutions.

He matriculated from Lebone II College of the Royal Bafokeng, studied at African Leadership Academy and Babson College in the United States, and started his career as an investment banking analyst at Deutsche Bank, where he worked on transactions including the IPO of digital asset platform Bullish.

Portfolio management team

The clearest example of his approach is an AI analyst agent built for a client’s portfolio management team, where Montsho served as product manager.

He worked with the portfolio managers to define the problem, set the roadmap, and guided the engineering team through delivery.

The agent sits on top of the firm’s research, email and portfolio data.

Portfolio managers use it to check what’s changed in a company’s outlook, find which notes mention their holdings, and see whether new information conflicts with the reason they bought a position.

They use it daily.

‘What can AI do?’

A second phase, which Montsho is now managing, adds thesis-drift alerts, conviction tracking, notes generated from recorded calls, and quantitative analysis inside the chat.

“The first question we asked wasn’t ‘what can AI do,'” Montsho says.

“It was ‘what does this team worry about missing?’ That shaped almost everything.”

He has applied the same approach in other industries, again as product manager.

He took that role on a Techbridge platform for buying and selling private businesses, which brings business owners and acquirers into one system with AI-assisted deal analysis.

For a yacht charter business, he managed the product through an 18-month build of a booking and operations platform with portals for brokers, customers and yacht owners, plus an operations console for staff.

Most potential

Montsho says the portfolio-management work is where he sees the most potential.

His view is that asset managers will move towards bespoke agents that understand a firm’s own process, holdings and house views, and that help portfolio managers weigh new evidence and adjust portfolio composition.

The manager stays responsible for the decision; the agent makes sure it’s an informed one.

“Off-the-shelf AI tools know the market,” he says.

“They don’t know your fund. The firms that get the most out of this will be the ones that build around their own way of investing.”