AI Agents Cut 3-Day Portfolio Builds to Minutes — Jack McDonald, Apollo & Michael Manapat, Rowspace

Apollo's CLO business used to spend 2–3 days building a single mock portfolio by hand in Excel. Now it takes minutes. Jack McDonald (Principal at Apollo and COO of Redding Ridge, Apollo's ~$50B structured credit and CLO manager) talks with Rowspace co-founder Michael Manapat about where AI becomes mission-critical in finance. They cover automating a weekly trade reconciliation that used to take 2–3 people, why plugging your firm into a generic LLM isn't enough when one data point can come from 20 sources and only one is right, and why embedding engineers with the front office is what earns trust. Speakers: Michael Manapat, Co-founder, Rowspace X: https://x.com/mlmanapat https://rowspace.ai Jack McDonald, Principal, Apollo / COO, Redding Ridge https://www.apollo.com 0:00 Intro: Rowspace & Redding Ridge 1:33 When AI becomes mission-critical 3:38 Portfolio construction: days → minutes 5:31 Automating the weekly trade rec 6:46 Why not just use Claude or ChatGPT? 9:21 How Apollo became AI-native early 11:17 How early is finance in AI adoption? 13:24 Commodity or durable competitive edge? 15:22 What has to be true next 18:20 Advice for builders applying AI to finance Live from the Sheraton New York Times Square Hotel in New York City, AI Engineer New York 2026 is an AI conference for engineers and technical leaders building production AI across banking, hedge funds, fintech, insurance, and asset management. Event: AI Engineer NYC Dates: October 12–14, 2026 Venue: Sheraton New York Times Square Hotel Learn more about the event: https://ai.engineer/nyc/2026# Subscribe for more AI Engineer talks, livestreams, and event coverage: https://www.youtube.com/@aiDotEngineer