Wealth Enhancement strategist says AI creates false diversification in alternatives

Ayako Yoshioka, senior investment strategist at Wealth Enhancement, says client alternatives portfolios may offer a false sense of diversification because many holdings share one underlying bet on artificial intelligence.

She made the comments on a Goldman Sachs Asset Management webinar tied to the firm's second annual Alternatives Investor Survey, InvestmentNews reported. Yoshioka described Wealth Enhancement as the seventh-largest RIA, with about $160 billion in assets under management.

"I think for us the biggest risk is just having a false sense of diversification," she said. "A portfolio can hold a lot of investments across multiple asset classes and still be exposed to a lot of the same underlying economic or thematic risks. And we're seeing that with AI right now."

AI is not only an equity story, Yoshioka said; it is also a theme in public fixed income, venture, private equity, and private credit vehicles that finance data centers and real estate. Holdings whose returns depend on AI adoption, agentic workflows, data usage and continued demand for compute could share one driver across asset classes.

She urged advisors to understand what is driving the underlying returns and ask what could cause permanent loss to a fund holding.

Goldman's survey of 1,000 U.S. high-net-worth and ultra-high-net-worth investors found 63% now view alternatives as high or very high risk, up from 56% a year earlier. Among current alternatives holders, 93% said they are happy with their investments and 97% said results met or beat expectations, while 38% plan to increase allocations over the next two years.

Roughly 92% of millennials already own alternatives, and investors familiar with the asset class were nearly five times more likely to make a new alternatives investment.

Dennis Bielik, executive vice president at HUB Retirement and Private Wealth, the wealth and retirement unit of HUB International, told InvestmentNews advisors need to be aware of clients whose wealth already comes from technology to avoid over-exposure through private equity funds.