By David French and Isla Binnie
WEST PALM BEACH, Florida, Feb 3 (Reuters) - Disruption to businesses from artificial intelligence development is "top of the page" for Blackstone, the world's largest alternative asset manager, its president and chief operating officer Jon Gray said on Tuesday.
"You want to be thinking about this in almost everything you're doing now," Gray told the WSJ Invest Live event in West Palm Beach, Florida.
Blackstone manages assets worth $1.27 trillion, spanning most sectors
of the economy across the world.
Some of its portfolio, including sandwich shops and apartment complexes, are "less at risk", Gray said. But other businesses face much more serious questions, he added, citing an insurance firm lowering rates for customers using self-driving cars.
"You start to say, well, what does that mean for collision repair? What does that mean for auto insurance? What's going to happen to all sorts of rules-based businesses?" he said.
Along with other large private capital firms, Blackstone has invested heavily in the infrastructure around AI, including data center operator QTS, which drove growth in its funds last year. It also invests in power generation and transmission and agreed to buy U.S. utility TXNM for $11.5 billion last year.
Gray said focusing on "picks and shovels" is the safest way to play the AI megatrend.
"You don't necessarily have to know who the winners and losers are going to be," Gray said. "The data centers, the autonomous vehicles, the robots, they are all going to plug into the wall and there's going to be a lot of need for digital infrastructure."
Gray said Blackstone is also investing in large-language-model companies and other software firms that apply AI technology, "because I think there will be an enormous amount of value, but that is obviously riskier".
(Reporting by David French in West Palm Beach and Isla Binnie in New York. Editing by Mark Potter)
