MSCI Institutional Investor Forum

Sacramento

8:00 a.m. ・ Registration & Networking Breakfast

8:30 a.m. ・ Welcome and introduction

8:40 a.m. ・ Keynote

9:05 a.m. ・ Positioning for a Shifting World: Navigating AI, Geopolitics and the New Investment Paradigm

Institutional investors are contending with three converging forces — the rapid build-out of AI infrastructure, a more fragmented geopolitical order and mounting pressure on energy security and physical resilience. Each is reshaping portfolios in its own right: AI is redefining competitive advantage and exposure across sectors, geopolitical realignment is changing the calculus around trade, supply chains and capital flows and energy security concerns are elevating physical risk as a core underwriting consideration.

This session brings together senior investment leaders to address how these forces are shaping portfolio positioning. It will offer a grounded view of how leading institutions are adapting to an environment in which AI, geopolitics and energy security can no longer be considered in isolation.

9:55 a.m. ・ Networking Break

10:15 a.m. ・ Public Markets, Reimagined: Finding Alpha in a Changing Landscape 

Global public equity markets are undergoing structural change, and the forces are compounding: concentration at generational highs as a narrow cohort of mega-caps carries more of the benchmark, a heavy IPO calendar reshaping the index and AI reordering which businesses lead.

This panel brings asset owners together with MSCI specialists to examine where alpha is emerging as that landscape resets, from gauging concentration and breadth, to what the IPO wave means for positioning, to how risk models hold up when a handful of names drive the benchmark. AI runs throughout on two dimensions: as an investment theme, where the problem is measuring genuine exposure across the value chain, and as a tool for sharpening portfolio construction and the signals allocators draw on for alpha. Running underneath both is a question about factor investing itself, as traditional style and sector definitions no longer capture where the real exposures sit.

11:05 a.m. ・ Private Markets Reset: How Sophisticated Investors Are Finding Opportunities

For large pension plans, how you invest in private markets now matters as much as what you invest in. Distributions are slow, liquidity remains constrained and returns depend more on choosing the right managers and opportunities, putting greater weight on a few consequential decisions.

Who do you back, and how do you tell real skill from a favorable market, especially among smaller, specialist firms? How do you keep committing through a difficult liquidity environment, and what do co-investments, secondaries and other structures change about both economics and what investors can actually see? And as valuations reset, where is repricing revealing risk and where is it creating opportunity?

Drawing on MSCI research, this session brings investment leaders together to discuss how they are navigating these choices, what’s changing and what they’re learning.

12:00 p.m. ・ Lunch

1:00 p.m. ・ The AI Imperative: Reinventing the Investment Organization

AI has the potential to be one of the most consequential innovations for the investment industry, reshaping how organizations work and what their teams are capable of. For asset owners facing growing demands on lean teams, applied well, AI can be a powerful force multiplier, unlocking individual productivity and expanding organizational capabilities. But turning that potential into results is extremely challenging, and for many firms, the impact is still emerging.

At MSCI, our ambition is to harness that potential to help transform how investing gets done. This panel brings together leaders from across the investment community for a candid, solution-focused conversation about what that means in practice. We’ll get specific about where AI is already creating value: codifying institutional knowledge rather than outsourcing it, sharpening decisions with richer data — especially the unstructured data most teams still leave on the table — and maintaining the security, trust and auditability that investment decisions demand.

Panelists won’t just talk about what worked. They’ll be honest about what didn’t, what they have learned and what it really takes to lead change at this scale.

1:50 p.m. ・ Seeing the Whole Portfolio: What Leading Funds Are Learning

As public and private markets converge, the hardest questions in total portfolio thinking sit at the analytical level. How do you compare public and private assets in common terms? How much risk does a private commitment really carry? And how do you judge a new opportunity by its contribution to the whole portfolio rather than its standalone return?

This session brings together asset owners who are putting these tools to work, sharing how they use cross-asset factor models and other analytical tools to sharpen total portfolio decisions. Panelists and MSCI experts will discuss what these analytics reveal that asset-class silos miss, where the tools still fall short, and how funds at different stages are turning total portfolio thinking into everyday investment decisions.

2:35 p.m. ・ Networking Break

2:55 p.m. ・ Global Asset Owner Technology & AI Peer Study: A First Look

Thinking Ahead Institute's Roger Urwin shares brief early findings from its new Global Asset Owner Technology & AI Peer Study on how the world's largest asset owners are integrating technology and AI across people, process and governance to strengthen total portfolio outcomes.

3:05 p.m. ・ Fireside Chat: Leadership Perspectives 

To close the Forum, senior asset owner leaders reflect on what it takes to guide large investment organizations through profound change while staying focused on long-term mandates. The discussion will explore how leadership priorities are evolving as markets, technology and the investment landscape shift, from setting strategy and strengthening governance to building the talent and capabilities institutional investing will demand in the years ahead.

4:05 p.m ・ Closing Remarks