Systemic Investing Summit 2025 presentation: Artificial Intelligence within the field of Systemic Investing

What happens when artificial intelligence meets systemic investing? At the 2025 Systemic Investing Summit we explored this very question in our talk: How Can AI Safely and Responsibly Augment the Practice of Systemic Investing? This post distils the key ideas and insights we shared during the summit.

By Andre Ticoulat

This session on the “wise use” of of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Systemic Investing (SI) stemmed from a research collaboration between TransCap and Mutua, which is dedicated to exploring how AI can be responsibly integrated to enhance SI practices. You can learn more about the motivations and research framework here.

We have now published the first output of the collaboration, which presents a framing that will guide and structure our research. We examined three different SI frameworks, using them to identify the ‘systemic investing journey’ — a comprehensive overview of the various processes and tasks that investors and orchestrators might undertake as part of an SI initiative. We then assess what capabilities are required in each step of this journey. We will later examine which capabilities can safely and responsibly be augmented with AI.

Back to the session at the summit: We kicked off our session by delving into the myriad narratives that shape our understanding of AI — spanning from Silicon Valley’s techno-optimism to the more critical perspectives challenging its role and impact.

Beyond the hype and pessimism, we argue that the wide-spread deployment and adoption of LLMs in society is in fact reshaping our media ecologies, significantly influencing our cultures. As with earlier transformative waves — radio, television, the internet, and social media — these technologies will redefine how we understand ourselves, relate to one another, interpret the world, and influence our capacity to deal with the challenges of our time. Ultimately, these new general purpose technologies exponentiate capacities in society, influencing numerous dimensions of our lives.

We then collectively reflected on what these shifts actually mean to society. Does the adoption of these new tools bring about deep, structural changes to our economies and societies writ large?

All the hype and narrative around AI/ AGI as a revolution stems from a specific worldview — primarily championed by Silicon Valley (check out TESCREAL). This dominant framing obscures how AI technologies actually reinforce existing economic structures, social hierarchies, and power dynamics. Rather than fundamentally transforming society, AI is accelerating the very societal processes driving contemporary social, democratic, and environmental challenges. At its core lies an incentive structure to deploy new models as fast as possible in a relentless race toward market dominance (what Tristan Harris calls the “Race to Rollout”).

This exploration served as a foundation for a deeper reflection on the actual, observable impacts AI is already having across society, the environment, social, geopolitics, and psychology:

After exploring some of the uncomfortable truths AI-enthusiasts tend to ignore, such as labor exploitation and the ethical implications of AI decision-making, our presentation pointed to a few emerging fields of application of AI that excites us. There is a significant wave of research centers, collaborations, and innovative initiatives exploring how AI can be leveraged to expand our capacity to solve pressing societal issues. One example is the use of AI to augment collective intelligence processes, check out initiatives like AI for Collective Intelligence and Nesta’s Collective intelligence design. Other emerging initiatives that think about relationality and decolonial perspectives in AI, such as the Burnout from Humans project from the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures, were also highlighted as ways forward in the wise use of AI.

We then returned to the context of systemic investing, exploring the exciting potential of AI to enhance specific stages within the SI process. Here we explored a variety of different tools, including Mutua.systems’ latest developments, particularly highlighting the AI-enabled stakeholder and systems mapping tools they have already developed, specifically designed to support and improve decision-making processes for systemic investors.

We concluded the session with a collaborative workshop structured around four key questions:

  • Are there additional or novel ways to leverage AI for Systemic Investing (SI) that were not mentioned or do not currently exist?
  • Where do participants see the greatest potential for using AI in SI, and what specific benefits could this offer?
  • What are the primary risks and limitations associated with integrating AI into SI?
  • Given the identified benefits and risks, what key principles should guide the responsible use of AI in SI

We extend our heartfelt thanks to all participants for their insightful contributions, which enriched our dialogue immensely. Below is a summary of the discussion points:

Do you want to collaborate with us?

There is an urgent need to rethink the way we deploy financial capital for transformative impact in human and natural systems. The field of systemic investing has garnered significant momentum, and now is the time to scale deep and scale out. So we invite challenge owners, systems thinkers, innovation practitioners, investment professionals, ecosystem shapers, and creative voices to join us in figuring out how to redeploy financial capital in service of a prosperous and sustainable future for all.

How is systemic investing relevant to

Foundations

...because the pots of capital operating under a philanthropic logic are orders of magnitude smaller than those operating under an investment logic, so systemic investing is a way for foundations to leverage their capital in the systems they care about.

Corporations

...because their supply chains are becoming increasingly fragile and societal expectations of business are growing. This requires companies to deploy all the tools in their finance toolbox (incl. direct investments, advanced purchase agreements, and supply-chain financing) and partner more strategically with governments, foundations, and NGOs.

Impact Investors

...because single technologies, start-ups, or social enterprises—no matter how ingenious their solutions and how brilliant their teams—are unlikely to change systems by themselves. So what matters is that these single-point solutions are synergistically nested within a broader systems change effort.

Institutional Investors

...because mainstream ESG investing doesn’t benefit places and communities at the pace, scale, and quality required, so institutional investors must channel more capital into real-economy assets in a strategic and collaborative manner.

MDBs and DFIs

...because sustainable development in a VUCA world requires portfolio approaches to systems innovation, and those need to be funded with a different investment paradigm than those dominant in development finance institutions today. And because the public sector cannot finance sustainability transitions alone, so systemic investing is a way to crowd-in private-sector capital in a smart way.

Engage with us

Which option best describes your interest in systemic investing?

Your message has been sent!
Something went wrong – try again
About

Who We Are

The TransCap Initiative is a think-and-do-tank operating at the nexus of real-economy systems change, sustainability, and finance. We operate as a multi-stakeholder alliance coordinated by a backbone team and comprised of wealth owners, innovation leaders, system thinkers, research institutes, and financial intermediaries. Our community is open to anyone committed to our cause and values.

Why We Exist

We exist to improve the way sustainable finance is purposed, designed, and managed so that money can become a transformative force in building a low-carbon, climate-resilient, just, and inclusive society. We believe that the key to accomplishing this vision is to inspire and enable investors to leverage the insights and tools of systems thinking and complex systems science for addressing the most pressing societal challenges of the 21st century.

What We Do

Our mission is to build the field of systemic investing. This means developing, testing, and scaling an investment logic at the intersection of systems thinking and finance. We do that by convening a multi-stakeholder alliance to develop a knowledge and innovation base, test novel concepts and approaches, and build a community of practice.

Our core ideas borrow from the disciplines of systems thinking and complex systems science, challenge-led innovation, human-centred design, new economic frameworks, and financial innovation. Our experiments are contextualised in those place-based systems that matter most for human prosperity—such as cities, landscapes, and coastal zones—as well as in value chains and other real-economy systems. We hope that our work produces knowledge and insights, methods and tools, and a self-organising community of inspired and enabled change makers.

The places and value chains we intend to transform act as centres of gravity for our work. In each of these systems, we will work with challenge owners, communities, innovators, investors, and other stakeholders to design, structure, and finance strategic investment portfolios nested within a broader systems intervention approach.

Learn More

Contact Us

TransCap Core Team
community@transformation.capital