Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Bank of America's 34th Annual Financial Services Conference. This is Craig Siegenthaler, North American Head of Diversified Financials, and I'm very pleased to introduce Michael Arougheti. Mike is a Co-Founder, CEO, and a Director of Ares Management. Mike, thank you for joining us today.
Thanks for having me. Always good to be with you.
So Ares is one of the largest alt managers in the world, with a world-class business, including its number one non-investment grade private credit franchise. Five years ago, the firm managed around $200 billion in AUM. Now it's $600 billion, three times. With that, let's get started with a big picture question on the macro front. So we've entered year four of the bull market. IPOs and M&A are expected to accelerate. The Fed's cutting rates, but spreads are tight. private equity realizations are expected to rebound, but they've been depressed for a while. How do you see this macro backdrop playing out in 2026 for the industry and Ares specifically?
Yeah. Thanks again for having me, Craig. It's always good to be with all of you. Look, we're very constructive on the deal environment for 2026. If you go back and listen to some of the commentary around our third quarter earnings call in the fall, we said that we saw pipelines beginning to accelerate into year-end, and that those pipelines were both new transaction driven, but as importantly, diversified across each of our businesses. We came through the end of the year, we continued to see the acceleration, and as we just announced on our earnings call, we had a record fourth quarter, about $46 billion of capital deployed in Q4.
And we also said on our earnings call that, as of the end of January, our pipeline, which we track across all of our businesses, was at a record high in January, which usually is a good predictor for transaction volumes within the first six months of that, determination date. So the markets are obviously having some AI jitters, which we could probably talk about a little bit later. But given everything that we're seeing fundamentally, as you mentioned, constructive rate backdrop, pro-business administration and a deregulatory stance, banks de-risking and driving capital markets activity, real estate volume is picking up after valuations have troughed, aging private equity portfolios and dry powder. There's just a lot there to catalyze deal flow.
So barring any unforeseen, macro event, which is always a possibility, we would think that transaction volumes will be pretty healthy this year.
Great. So, I know you said a little bit later, but maybe we could-
I was just hoping we could push it to the very end and run out of time.
So, you know, we can't get through a fireside chat without hitting on software AI disruption, which became a really big topic after Anthropic's Claude launch, like a week ago. But I guess it feels longer than that. But I think it's important to note that a lot of what you do is private credit. We're talking 30% LTV business, so big cushion sort of in front of you. And even on the equity front, not all companies are created equal. But, you know, from your seat, from more of a private market lens, what is your perspective on what just unfolded? We knew a lot of this a year or two ago.
Yeah, I don't want to consume the entire conversation on this issue, but it's interesting because as a private market practitioner, we try not to get whipsawed by the headlines of the day. It is quite odd to us that the public markets have woken up to AI disruption as a theme. You know, if you've been investing over the last 5+ years, and you haven't been thinking about opportunities and risks created from technology and AI implementation, you've probably been asleep at the switch. Before we talk about the software narrative specifically, I think it's also important to understand that for every company that gets disrupted, there's probably a company that's getting improved. Margins are expanding, productivity is expanding. They're able to invest in growth in new ways.
As the AI revolution continues to proliferate, you're going to see meaningful, meaningful opportunities to invest in digital infrastructure, renewable energy, transmission. So from the Ares Management lens, given that we are balance sheet light and not owning these exposures directly, we're feeling pretty good, if not great, about the way that we're positioned, given the dry powder that we have, and given the fact that we expect that this will create as much opportunity to go on offense as risks in the portfolio. So again, I think this narrative right now, at least as everybody's digesting it, feels very one-sided and everybody's anxious about risk. And I would just encourage everybody to be thinking about what does that mean for everything else in your portfolios.
And then to your point on software specifically, I think software is a little bit of a, of a misnomer, and, and folks should be thinking not just about software, but generally about technology transformation and AI disruption. If you're a business services company or a healthcare services company or a, a technology business, you are either going to have risk or opportunity from AI implementation. This is not a software issue. So I think that, again, the, the market is too narrowly defining what the set of issues is in front of them. And again, they'll, they'll eventually get there. When we look at our portfolio, 6% of our exposures are to software companies, broadly speaking, across the waterfront. These tend to be enterprise software businesses where we have two-sided networks, meaningful proprietary data moats, mission-critical systems.
It's not to say that every exposure we have is immune, but obviously, as I said earlier, the first question we've asked ourselves across everything in our portfolio for the last 5+ years has been: What is the opportunity and risk from AI? And so not surprisingly, when we now go back and continue to re-underwrite the exposures we have, we feel like we're very well mitigated.
Great. So, you know, let's, let's probably hit on a more important topic. What are your strategic priorities, for this year? You know, you've gone through an active period of M&A-
Mm-hmm
... really transformed the business. You don't really have a lot of product gaps yet, but last year, you did talk a little bit private equity, an area you could be bigger in. So when you take a step back, what are the strategic priorities today? And, you know, when you rank them, private equity come out in the top five?
Mm-hmm. Private equity actually does not come out in the top five, but I'll cover that because I think it's an important thing to keep in mind when you think about our potential future growth and the way that the market's developing. Probably top of the list is continued expansion in our digital infrastructure business. We bought a company called GCP last year. The investment thesis there was to, one, grow larger in Japan. We think we acquired the preeminent real estate manager in the Japanese market, and we've been quite happy with the product set and the performance there. Two, it was to diversify our global industrial real estate business. We are now the third-largest developer, owner, operator of warehouses in the world, which many people don't know.
And then third, we acquired a data center development capability of about 85 people under the brand Ada Infrastructure. And alongside that data center capability came a data center pipeline of very large build-to-suit hyperscaler projects across the globe in Tokyo, Osaka, London, São Paulo, Northern Virginia. And part of the thesis was that we would take the existing Ares digital infrastructure capabilities, the existing Ares renewable energy teams, and then accelerate into this data center development business, and that's been a big success. In the first year, we closed a $2.4 billion Japanese data center fund. The pipeline that we've articulated publicly requires another $6 billion of equity just to get done what's in front of us, and so that's something that we're working on now.
So I think number one priority is just continuing to lean into the momentum there, and ride the, the secular tailwinds in that business. Two, as I mentioned, Japan. We already have a large business in APAC. We now have a very meaningful foothold in the Japanese market with a market-leading position in real estate. The goal will be now to continue to diversify the product set off of that real estate strength in the Japanese market into things like private credit and infrastructure. Third will be the continued development of our vertically integrated real estate approach.
We are now, I think, the third-largest institutional real estate manager in the market, broadly diversified across geographies and product types, and we've been going through a very intentional and systematic move to become vertically integrated, meaning that we want to develop, own, and manage our own real estate, as opposed to many institutional real estate investors who are partnering with operating partners or buying developed product that's been stabilized by third parties. The reason we're focused on that is I think as asset management matures, those that can create their own asset flow and own them for the entirety of their life cycle will, will have competitive advantage. We're very far along in that journey in industrials. We're very far along in that journey in multifamily, which represent close to 90% of the exposures that we manage.
But we still have some work to do to just continue to fill in that capability. And then lastly, and maybe speaking to the AI conversation, we are very focused now on capturing margin opportunity across the entirety of our business. There's a lot of work happening strategically to consolidate our middle-office functions and drive efficiencies. We've been showing really healthy margin improvement over the last number of years, but I think we're at a place now in our evolution where we can really accelerate that with some intentional investment in technology and organizational redesign. Private equity, you know, we have said publicly, and it got amplified by an article in the FT, that we have an open mind to being bigger in private equity.
It's interesting, if you look at the history of the firm, we started off almost equal private equity, private credit, and liquid credit. Just given the growth that we've experienced in other parts of our private equity hasn't kept pace. That's neither good nor bad. It is what it is. The argument to be bigger private equity is, one, our institutional clients are all large investors private equity, and I think as they consolidate their wallet share with fewer and fewer managers, to the extent that we had a private equity offering, I think that we would see meaningful inflows.
Two, it does give you a skill set as an owner and operator that you don't get at scale in other parts of the business, and so a private equity capability would be able to be leveraged across other parts of our business in terms of value creation, management, and operating relationships, and that's something that we think is important. Third, in order to deliver equity exposures away from secondaries to the end investor, you have to be large enough that you can have enough line items to deliver diversified exposure. So we actually think that if we can get large enough, it would actually benefit our ability to deliver unique product into wealth and retirement.
The reason that we're open-minded but don't have a sense of urgency around it is private equity business, in and of itself, is not a growth business. We've been very focused, as I think many of you know, in delivering consistent, predictable growth in our FRE and our RI to the tune of 20%+. Private equity does not compound linearly the same way that the rest of the business does, and so if we were to do it, we would have to do it in a way that we were able to account for the slower growth in price and in high conviction that we can actually drive the revenue synergy that I just talked about.
Well, you know, sticking with that target, I want to hit on some of the guidance you gave us at the 2024 Investor Day.
Mm-hmm.
You know, you've actually raised some, like your wealth AUM target, and other areas like fundraising, FRE margin, you know, really performed well last year. As you sit here today, how do you feel relative to these targets? I thought maybe you could highlight a few that you feel pretty good about.
Well, we just reaffirmed them on the last call. So just to remind everybody, we've said that we hope, and this is ex acquisition, organically, to grow our FRE 16%-20%+ per year. We said that we expect to grow our RI 20%+ per year, and that's been reaffirmed as of last week. We did raise our wealth targets. That's just a simple math. If you were to run rate the experience that we're having now, just given the diversity of product that we have and the growth, you'll get to the 125 if we don't see acceleration in that growth. So I think we have high conviction in that change. And then lastly, we just announced our dividend for Q1, which was up 20%.
For those of you who have not been following the company, we try to peg the dividend to our expected FRE growth, and that's been a pretty consistent capital management distribution policy for the company. So, you know, the dividend increase of 20% hopefully gives people increased confidence in the guidance.
Great. I wanted to dig a little deeper into private credit. I mean, arguably, you're the number one non-IG private credit ABF lender in the world. Very large business-
My mom would be so proud. I don't...
I'll tell her.
Yeah.
Let's see. Long-term performance here has been much stronger than peers, and another barometer is you raise these huge institutional funds that many of your peers actually can't. You know, how are you able to do this? What's the secret sauce? How has performance been so good for so long?
Trying to think how to attack this, 'cause there's a lot of important things to talk about. Look, we've been lending institutionally for over 30 years, and, you know, if you go back even to the early 2000s when we were building the business here, very few people knew what private credit or direct lending was. And so at the risk of sounding immodest, I actually think that we were pioneers in the business. And one of the first realizations we had, was that the way that you were going to win over the long term was to out-originate people. And the reason that's so important is driving performance and credit is about being right almost 100% of the time, right?
You have asymmetric downside risk, because if you're wrong, you can lose all of your money, and if you're right, you can make your coupon. So you have to be right 99% of the time, if you really want to outperform. And in order to do that, it has to start with building these really, really broad origination funnels and being selective in what you choose to invest in. So for our entire history, it's been origination-led, with an understanding that that allows us to drive really, really high asset selectivity, and that has never changed. Even today, we invest in only 3%-5% of the transactions that come across our desk. So we say no, 95%-97% of the time. So that's number one.
Number two, we also learned over time that scale was actually a driver of performance, and the reason for that was, one, as you grew, you could invest more in these deep origination networks, more offices, more countries, more people, more product. Two, it made you more relevant to a broader set of borrowers in the market. Even today, if you talk to a smaller private credit firm, they will tell you one of their greatest frustrations is they identify a good borrower, they grow, and then they leave their portfolio. So we constructed the product set to grow with the borrower as they grew, so that we can hold on to our highest quality borrowers longer, and that's a function of scale. It's also a function of product flexibility, right? You need to meet the client where they are.
If they need a mezz loan and you're only a senior lender, you're gonna lose the client. All of that drives one of the most important drivers of performance, which is incumbency. So if you were to look at our deployment in any given year, about 50% of our investments in private credit are to existing borrowers, where we have a long-standing relationship. So that, that allows you over time to just continue to re-underwrite your best performing companies... and your exposure to them just compounds with their cash flow growth. So this is probably one of the most misunderstood parts of our performance, but also the growth in private credit.
Our portfolios generally compound at 10% EBITDA growth or more, and so if all you do is continue to grow and stay at the same attachment point with those borrowers, you're going to enjoy 10% growth in your private credit book with high-quality performance because you get to re-underwrite those investors. So when you're talking about a market that's growing at 15% compound, and everybody's anxious about that linear growth rate, half of it, if you're doing it well, is coming from embedded cash flow growth in your portfolio, and half is coming from new investors, new clients.
And then the thing that I think is most important about the outperformance is when you've been doing it for 30 years and you see the entirety of the market, you develop really deep industry expertise in terms of where you want to lean in and where you want to avoid. And all of the information that we capture is not just on that 3%-5% that we said yes to, it's on the 97% that we said no to. And so the information advantage that we've been able to create over 30 years of aggregating this information and seeing the performance over hundreds of billions of dollars of investments has led to this competitive advantage that compounds.
And to your point, you know, if you look at our public track record, which I think is a good proxy for our entire track record, we've had a compound annual return in excess of 12% for over 20 years, with close to 0% losses. So that's pretty good. But it also is why we also have so much high conviction that when we go through periods of time like the one we're in now, where the markets get anxious, that this is actually a time for opportunity and not a time for risk.
So, you know, last year was an interesting year in private credit, where if I look across the industry, I see a lot of funds doing eight, nine, 10% returns. You know, pretty good.
Mm-hmm.
Credit quality on average, you know, maybe not as good as two years ago, which was unusually strong, but still pretty good relative to history. Yet, there's a negative narrative out there, you know, especially around the media in the second half, and it did hurt retail flows, you know, a little bit. You know, so it was kind of weird because the fundamentals were still pretty good. So, you know, from your seat, what did you think of this whole dynamic?
Goes back a little bit to my earlier comment about AI. There, there has been, as long as we've been in business, there's been a kind of a persistent hum in the market about risk and private credit. I could go back and show you articles as early as 2005 about all the risks in BDCs and private credit and lack of transparency, and I think it probably, first and foremost, comes just from a place of misunderstanding, right? If you're very wired to public capital markets and you're not attuned to how the private markets are developing as a synergy, as synergy and a supplement to the public markets, it would be pretty scary if you see these markets growing.
And two, at the risk of sounding cynical, I think that there are a lot of entrenched players, whether it's rating agencies or banks, that don't want to see the private markets develop the way that they are developing because it actually hurts their, their core business. And so, you know, I think the media, more than anybody, has kind of picked up on this and is trying to promote the narrative. I can tell you, you know, when we talk to our large institutional clients, there's no anxiety about risk exposure and private credit. And even in retail, you mentioned, while we did see, redemption queues, we did not see outflows, and I think that's also important. Net flows in wealth to private credit were actually positive, and for the leading managers like us, they were meaningfully positive.
So even that narrative, when you see 97% of your investors in wealth not wanting to redeem, that should be the story. It should be the durability of those exposures and the continued appetite, but yet the story is 3% of the investor base wanted to redeem. So I think it's, it's important. We got to keep educating, we have to keep performing. With each cycle of performance through volatility, the asset class gets more, you know, more durability and legitimacy broadly, but I can't quite put my finger on it. It's, it's frankly a frustrating, frustrating narrative for folks like us who've been doing it a long time. But, I don't actually think that it is going to have a meaningful impact on the business. You and I have talked about this. I think it's important to...
We've tried to construct our product set and our fund families to be able to actually go on offense when the markets dislocate. And if you look at our history, it's interesting. Our two fastest periods of growth were through the GFC and through COVID. And one of the ways that we do that is all of those competitive advantages that I just talked about in terms of scale and capital, but it's the combination of institutional dry powder and wealth working hand in hand, right? So if you think about the positioning of Ares in, let's say, U.S. direct lending, we have very large institutional funds, as you referenced earlier. We have very large traded funds, very large semi-liquid funds and SMAs. That allows us to have very, very diversified portfolios, where no single exposure will impact performance in any fund.
But that dry powder, which now sits over $150 billion on the platform, uniquely positions us to actually be a capital provider into a dislocated market. Whereas if you're reliant on wealth or reliant on annuities, sometimes those flows will dry up, and you're not gonna be able to lean into the dislocation the way that you probably want to. So we're hyper-attuned to making sure that even as we grow these other parts of the business, that the institutional business is still large and, you know, that we have those big dry powder stashes.
So, you know, with the pro-business agenda, this administration, you know, one area is that, you know, seems to have a benefit is the banks, where you've seen more tailwinds on the regulatory side, SLR, Basel III Endgame. If banks go a little bit more on the attack, you know, how does this impact your business? As you know, one area is through the BSL market, but also they could be more lending more aggressively in areas where they'll hold things on their balance sheet, too. Are you seeing them compete more?
So this is another example of a one-sided narrative, right? The narrative that people wanna talk about is banks take more risk, and there's a war going on between private credit and banks for market share. Fundamentally not true. The banks and private credit managers are incredibly symbiotic. It's important for us back to being hedged against the different outcomes. We've developed a private credit business that is playing across the entire spectrum of size companies in the middle market. $5 million of EBITDA, up to $1 billion+. There is a portion of our market where when the banks de-risk, we can move in and be a capital provider, and when they're risk-on, they're gonna, you know, put some of that product into the broadly syndicated loan market. That's not the entirety of the private credit market.
It's actually a very small percentage of exposures. But what winds up happening when they do that, CLO formation increases. We are one of the largest CLO managers in the market and a meaningful sales and trading partner to the banks, like BofA. And so to the extent that BofA is risk-on in BSL and high yield, we then are a very reliable partner to the banks on the CLO and sales and trading side. The other thing that people probably don't understand is the banks, when they're increasing the exposure, are generally gonna be going after IG exposure. They're not rebuilding deep origination networks in sub-investment grade credit. So when you see the banks actually feeling like they have capital relief and wanna take more risk, that probably means two things for us.
It means that they're providing more capital to us in the wholesale lending business, which is driving the cost of our capital down and driving our returns up. And it also means that they're probably talking to us about ways to use our balance sheet to help drive velocity of capital on their balance sheet. So if you look at what's happening now, as they're continuing to drive competition into the BSL market, we're seeing more capital available to us on our own balance sheet, and we're talking to them about portfolio sales, SRTs, flow agreements, ways that we can help partner with them to monetize the client franchise because we fundamentally do different things.
So again, if you were to see us interacting with our bank partners, it's usually, if not always, in the spirit of partnership and working together and not, you know, competition and a battle for a very small sliver of market share.
So over the history of the private credit industry, the BDC industry, I mean, there's always been a few bad apples. So, you know, as you come forward today, do you think, you know, the industry's in better shape today? And also, are you seeing any underwriting going across the industry that sort of maybe makes you a little nervous, areas that Ares is not participating in?
I think that look, the BDCs are again a smallish portion of the aggregate private credit industry. If you're asking, are BDCs, generally speaking, today, better positioned than they were 15 years ago? Absolutely. You know, I think the quality of manager, the size of the BDCs, which can drive diversification, the sophistication of management to make sure that the dividend is being protected and well-structured, I think they're fundamentally better than they ever have been. But to your point, there are still some managers that are, you know, if not bad actors, not good investors. You know, but back to the headlines, you can see you know, we're getting headlines that pop up every time a loan goes bad, and it's being extrapolated that private credit is, you know, hiding risk. And I think, again, that's problematic.
The private credit market is very concentrated. About 65% of the capital is sitting in the hands of the top 10 managers, and then there's everybody else. And so you could see poor performance in the, you know, other 35%. That doesn't mean that that is going to reveal itself in the top 65%, because of all the things I talked about before, in terms of the advantages of scale and incumbency and diversity. So, I do think you're gonna see dispersion of return. You're already seeing it in the non-traded and traded market, but that doesn't mean that that's an industry index. I think you have to zoom out and look at the big players first, and then look at the small players. And generally speaking, I think the big players are rational. To your point, we're not seeing bad underwriting.
You know, we're not seeing people buying market share like we have in the past. So it's, I think it's stable, rational, and performance for the top players continues to be quite good.
You know, 10, 20 years ago, there were a lot of BDCs that had significant declines in net asset values, and they got almost no attention-
Mm-hmm.
You know, from the media. Now it's, it's a little more sensitive, but, returns at, in private credit, they were outperforming in 2022, 2023 private equity and other asset classes. Now it's more narrow or even not. Private equity outperformed private credit last year, which it should, you know, it should do most years. At this moment, do you think there's an under-- you know, there's a rotation going from private credit to other alt asset classes, especially in the wealth channel?
Yes and no. If you look at alts, generally, I, I think most institutional investors and most individual investors are still meaningfully underallocated to alts. So the reason I say yes and no, it's hard to answer that question because it all depends on where the investor is in their own alts journey. There's a huge tailwind of people who are just coming into the market that are a retail investor buying a semi-liquid product for the first time, or a mid-sized institution that's beginning to rotate more aggressively into alts. So it's hard to, it's hard to look at the industry-wide penetration rates and, and really see that. I think for those that have mature private credit portfolios, their appetite for private credit continues because they are still generating excess return.
Even though it may have narrowed, it's still 150-200 basis points in excess of the traded alternative. In other market periods, it's been 300, 400, 500 basis points, but they're still getting excess return. The investors, particularly on the institutional side, who have been meaningful players in private credit, are looking at other parts of the private credit landscape for excess return. So not surprisingly, if you've been an early adopter of corporate direct lending, you may be looking at asset-based finance or infrastructure lending or real estate lending as a way to grow and diversify private credit exposure, not to replace your direct lending exposure. So the way I'm experiencing it is the incremental allocation may go to other places, but we're not seeing an active rotation.
I wanted to hit on wealth. I think you have eight products now in the wealth channel. I mean, you don't have that many product gaps left. You've been more selective in building out distribution, I think trying to avoid maybe some of the redemption waves that some of your peers have seen in prior years. Maybe talk to us about your strategy and where you want to see it go in the next few years.
Yeah, it's interesting, and this is—I think this is consistent with the way that we've built the business over the last 25 years, is we wanna make sure that when we're going into a market or an asset class or a distribution channel, that we have a right to win and that we understand how it's gonna affect other parts of our business. And so sometimes it looks like we're moving slowly, but behind the scenes, we're doing everything we need to do to set ourselves up for success. Wealth is a good example. You know, if you look at the history of our private credit business, it actually started with ARCC in the traded market. And we then segued that into a large institutional franchise, and wealth came last, and that was by design.
You know, I think, as I mentioned earlier, we understood through the management of ARCC, the challenges of the structure. The positives are lots of flexibility, lots of diversification, permanence of the capital base, but much more procyclical. You know, and if you looked historically at the retail markets, they would be wanting liquidity when they should be investing, and vice versa. And so very difficult to build a durable investment franchise if your capital is procyclical. And so when we saw the growth in wealth, we understood that that market was growing, but we had to make sure, as I said earlier, that it was never going to overwhelm our ability to deploy and that it was not going to overwhelm that institutional franchise that is kind of the core driver of our business.
But once we felt that we were set up to do it, we made appropriate investments, and we're now a, you know, 10%-ish market share player, top 3 distributor in the channel, and that's kind of a happy place for us. The market is evolving and has evolved quickly. If you look at our business as an example, you know, the amount of investment one needs to make to build a global wealth franchise is quite significant. We probably have 185 people. 30% of our flows are coming from non-U.S. markets, 8 products, significant distribution expense to spin these products up and get them scaled, significant investment to get these funds seeded and drive track record.
So my own view, self-serving to say it, is if you're not a meaningful player in wealth now, you're probably not going to be, just because the amount of investment, both P&L dollars, balance sheet dollars, but people that it would take to catch up is—it's too much given how developed the market is. So our plan is going to be to continue to diversify our distribution with our core product. These products are all scaled and scaling, and they deliver the best of Ares with very unique outcomes around durable yield—disadvantaged real assets exposure and diversified equity exposure. And behind those three themes, we're gonna continue to drive, drive the product. I think you'll see at the margin some new product innovation, particularly in the non-U.S. markets, where there's more appetite for geography-specific exposures.
But generally speaking, if we never added another product, the guidance that we've put out is intact. And it's interesting because it's very hard, back to my pro-cyclicality, to control flows in wealth. 'Cause you put the product out there, and then, you know, it ramps pretty aggressively. So we've been also very intentional about how we're building our distribution partnerships. So today, we have about 80 different distribution relationships within the wealth management sector. Half of those only have one of our funds. So part of what we're doing is we're building that stable of core relationships for product distribution, but we're slowly, you know, giving them more and more product as we're ramping.
So it feels like our relationship network, while we can continue to build it, is very well developed, and now it's just a question of deepening penetration within the existing distribution partnerships that we have.
Great. Well, I have one AI question left, but I wanted to leave time for a question from the audience. So if anyone has a question, please raise your hand. All right, let me go with the AI question. So Mike, I'm very curious how you're employing AI today. What do you think you'll be doing in three to five years? And then also, when I think about the business, is the output that this will drive the FRE margin higher and maybe better investment outcomes?
So the answer is both of those, and I'll come back to that. Folks may not remember this, but we brought a team of people into Ares probably three years ago through the acquisition of an AI venture firm called Bootstrap Labs. Small seed and Series A investors who had been investing across the AI ecosystem for 15 years prior. And the investment thesis on bringing them in-house was to have experts who were seeing, developing technologies so that we can evaluate risk and opportunity, as I said earlier, and that we could then deploy some of those tools and expertise broadly across the business to drive efficiencies, productivities, and hopefully better investment outcomes.
That capability sits within our corporate and operational strategy group so that we can deploy it across the platform and into our portfolio, and that team actively collaborates with our technology team under the leadership of our CTO, to make sure that we can implement and get the outcomes that we want. The way that it's rolling out is probably similar to many companies. The normal, you know, ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, that is being rolled out systematically to people's desktops so that they can just explore and drive efficiencies in their day-to-day work. And then, too, we have a process whereby we're going through use cases that are being pushed top-down or promoted bottoms-up within the organization. We're then piloting those use cases, and to the extent that we see high ROI and replicability across the platform, we're pushing it.
Last year, we probably looked at 160 viable use cases. We landed on about 25 that we're actively deploying now, in both the front office, middle and back office, and it's everything from NDA view and negotiation, which is now almost fully automated, AML, KYC processes, where we're able to take out legal and compliance resources and get better, better outcomes. Salesforce optimization, we're actually using AI to help our wealth salespeople drive better sales through lead generation and some, you know, data review. Our investment teams are using AI tools to help write investment committee memos and build models. So it's, it's pretty broad-based.
Interestingly, 2025 was probably the slowest year of organic headcount growth that we've had in the last 10+ years, and so I think that's an indication that some of these productivity initiatives are taking hold, where people are able to do more with the same headcount because of some of this productivity. And so, you know, we're still early days in that, in that process, but I've been quite pleased with some of the early results that we're getting.
Great. So with that, we will wrap that up. But, Mike, thank you so much-
Thank you, Craig.
... for joining us.
Thanks, everybody.
Really appreciate it.
Thanks.