The report
In December 2024, the CFA Institute Research and Policy Center published Pensions in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, a comprehensive study examining how AI and machine learning are being implemented across the pension value chain. The report, authored by Dr Genevieve Hayman, draws on interviews with pension experts and industry professionals from across the globe, and presents seven representative case studies to illustrate where and how these technologies are already being deployed.
The report addresses what it calls the central empirical question of the current moment: how emerging technologies can be applied to the critical issues facing the pension industry, from aging populations and underfunding to rising inequality and the shift from defined benefit to defined contribution plans. Its scope covers the full pension value chain, from member onboarding and recordkeeping through governance and investment strategy to decumulation and payout.
Knowa is one of the case studies featured in the report, alongside organisations including BlackRock, WTW, and the Stanford Research Initiative on Long-Term Investing. Aled Davies, Chief Commercial Officer at Knowa, is credited as a contributing expert.
Why pension governance is a focal point
The report identifies pension governance as one of the areas where AI has the greatest potential to improve outcomes. Pension governance, it notes, is inherently collaborative: it involves coordination among plan sponsors, trustees, investment managers, actuaries and legal counsel. The administrative burden on trustee boards is substantial, and the quality of decision-making depends on the quality of information flow between these parties.
The report's authors observe that AI technologies may assist multistakeholder interactions and reduce administrative burden through report summaries, error identification and prompt responses built on generative AI technology. Increased efficiencies in information sharing and analysis, they argue, could improve pension boards' decision-making, including investment strategy decisions, and produce timely resolutions to member issues.
This is precisely the problem Knowa was built to address.
The Knowa case study: Pi Partnership
The report features a detailed case study of Pi Partnership, an employee-owned trustee provider with 55 experienced professionals providing trusteeship, executive services and endgame solutions for UK pension schemes. Pi Partnership's trustee portfolio had grown rapidly, particularly in sole-trustee governance, and it needed to transition from a paper-bound workflow to a technology-driven platform that could maintain governance consistency across its portfolio.
Pi Partnership selected Knowa as its governance platform. The implementation gave trustees access to Knowa Q, the platform's AI-powered intelligence layer, which serves as a trustee copilot capable of taking minutes during meetings, summarising reports, answering questions about historical scheme content, organising documents by priority, and producing cited sources for all outputs.
The CFA Institute report notes that Pi Partnership described preparing for governance meetings as significantly less time-consuming with automated reports and the ability to respond to specific questions with relevant sources. Lynn Pointon, Head of Trusteeship at Pi Partnership, is quoted in the report observing that the tool frees trustees to concentrate on decision-making rather than research.
The case study also highlights that Knowa particularly benefited newer trustees who were less familiar with a scheme's history, levelling the playing field through equal access to the same information. Third-party involvement and external audits were improved because auditors could access a single platform.
Key principles the report identifies
The CFA Institute report sets out several key principles for pension plans considering AI adoption. Among them: the need to balance personalisation with product simplicity, the importance of developing collaborative multistakeholder solutions between firms, industry groups and regulators, and the principle that AI should enhance, not eliminate, human decision-making.
These principles align closely with Knowa's approach to trustee technology. Knowa does not advise. It does not recommend managers, evaluate covenant, or substitute for the judgement of an investment consultant, scheme actuary or legal adviser. The platform exists to augment the relationship between the board and the people who advise it, ensuring that when a trustee forms a judgement, the record they form it against is fully accessible, fully searchable and fully cited.
What this means for the industry
The CFA Institute report represents one of the most comprehensive studies to date on AI in pension management. Its inclusion of Knowa as a case study reflects the platform's position at the intersection of governance technology and pension trusteeship, a category that is being defined in real time as the industry grapples with how to integrate AI responsibly.
With over 1,000 UK trustee boards on the platform, representing more than £300 billion in assets under governance, Knowa is building the infrastructure for a future in which trustee technology makes challenge cheaper rather than ratification smoother. The CFA Institute's recognition of this approach is a meaningful signal that the governance technology category is being taken seriously at the highest levels of the investment profession.
The full report is available from the CFA Institute Research and Policy Center.
Every satisfactory board decision starts with the right information, at the right time, in the right hands.