Arizona PSPRS’ CIO Mark Steed's AI Scorecard One Year Later

Is "we have an AI strategy" the emptiest sentence in institutional investing right now? On Against Consensus, host Angelo Calvello and PSPRS CIO Mark Steed return for a candid AI progress check. Steed grades himself at ~25% toward his original efficiency and decision-making goals. The OpenAI/Hugging Face incident and new value-misalignment research have made him warier of managers pushing agentic systems, and interpretability remains a hard blocker for a fiduciary. He leans on Bertrand Russell's inductivist-turkey story to explain why high confidence in AI can still fail when regimes shift, cites a KPMG stat on managers already running agents in production, and offers his best line yet: "bet on the filing clerk instead of the PM. Mark Steed is Chief Investment Officer of PSPRS, the pension fund protecting the retirement security of Arizona's first responders. He has built and overseen portfolios across private equity, venture capital, real estate, public equity, absolute return, opportunistic credit, and global trading strategies. Institutional Investor and CIO Magazine have named him CIO of the Year, Asset Allocator of the Year, Innovator of the Year, and Rising Star. For four years, Mark served as a forecaster in Dr. Phil Tetlock's Good Judgment Project, shaping how he thinks about risk, decision-making under uncertainty. In This Episode: (00:00) Rapid-fire warm-up: data versus gut, speed, and beard maintenance (04:14) One-year AI progress check: roughly 25% toward original two goals (08:19) Build versus buy debate and outsourcing the data room problem (11:24) Ahead or behind peers: cloud enterprise versus workflow-first strategy (16:25) Agentic systems already in use, from inbox rules to briefings (18:01) OpenAI/Hugging Face incident and the risk of agentic misalignment (23:43) KPMG stat and tougher due diligence on managers using agents (27:26) Fiduciary pushback, interpretability, and Bertrand Russell's inductivist turkey (32:01) Future AI stack, advice for new CIOs, and closing thoughts Like, subscribe, and share this episode with someone who might be interested, and please take time to leave us a review! Dr. Angelo Calvello is a serial innovator and co-founder of multiple investment firms, including Rosetta Analytics and Blue Diamond Asset Management. He leverages his extensive professional network and reputation for authentic thought leadership to curate conversations with genuinely innovative allocators and thinkers. As the "Dissident" columnist for Institutional Investor and former "Doctor Is In" columnist for Chief Investment Officer (winner of the 2016 Jesse H. Neal Award), Calvello has become a leading voice challenging conventional investment wisdom. Beyond his professional pursuits, Calvello serves as Chairman of the Maryland State Retirement and Pension System's Climate Advisory Panel, Chairman of the Board of Outreach with Lacrosse and Schools (OWLS Lacrosse), a nonprofit organization creating opportunities for at-risk youths in Chicago, and trustee for a Chicago-area police pension fund. His career-long focus on leveraging innovation to deliver superior client outcomes makes him the ideal host for cutting-edge institutional investing conversations. Resources: Produced by Castos Productions https://castos.com/productions/ Mark Steed's LinkedIn:   / mark-steed   First episode with Mark (EP 2, prior Institutional Edge branding):    • An Asset Allocator's AI Uses Cases, Implem...   KPMG AI Pulse Survey (cited stat — confirm Q1 vs Q2, see flag above): https://kpmg.com/kpmg-us/content/dam/... PSPRS official site: https://www.psprs.com/ Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (London: Williams and Norgate, 1912), 98. PSPRS executive team / Mark Steed bio page: https://www.psprs.com/about/psprs-exe... Website: https://againstconsensus.com YouTube channel:    / @againstconsensus   LinkedIn:   / against-consensus   Podcast page: https://www.fin-news.com/category/pod... Fin News website link: https://www.fin-news.com/ Angelo Calvello email: acalvello@c79llc.com Dr. Angelo Calvello LinkedIn:   / angelocalvello