Tangen meets BEDS students on AI: "It's fun, huh?"

It was this spring, after a small scandal, that Nicolai Tangen cleared his calendar and booked his tickets across the mountains. His mission was to meet with students and faculty at NHH. According to him, academic institutions have been lagging behind the rapid developments in the AI field.

This sunny Wednesday, the Norges Bank Investment Management (NBIM) CEO has several points on his calendar. One of the main events is a lecture on 'AI in NBIM', given to all three years of BEDS students at the request of Associate Professor Jøril Mæland.

A historical hook

When the buzzing hype in Auditorium A has settled, Tangen is quick to claim the students' attention. He starts from the beginning, describing how Ekofisk was finally found on the day before Christmas Eve in 1969.

Given the large share of international students, it may be fitting to start with the basics: why Norway founded the Oil Fund in the first place. According to Tangen, oil is not always a positive force for the countries that hold it.

Today, almost 60 years after Ekofisk was discovered, the Oil Fund contributes about one fourth of the Norwegian national budget, he states.

Tech money

Tangen goes on to describe how the Oil Fund is involved in trade across the world. Constantly. He describes how the fund's operations move with stock markets around the world according to their opening hours, starting in Europe, moving to the US, and finishing a cycle in the Asian stock markets.

Today, the fund consists of 71% equities, 27% fixed income, 1.6% real estate and 0.4% renewable energy infrastructure.

All in all, NBIM is more of a tech company than a fund. In fact, it is increasingly becoming a software company, according to Tangen. This is because of the large number of technical tools used to manage the vast sums in the fund.

When it comes to AI, Tangen is, to nobody's surprise, very positive. This is especially true for the many young graduates and juniors entering the workforce.

He bases his view on two things. The first is young people's ability to adopt AI faster and better than older generations. More importantly, however, he states that organisations will change in favour of juniors. In an ideal world, the middle management layer of organisations will be minimal, with a larger share of employees at the top and bottom.

At the bottom of an ideal organisation, Tangen envisions juniors who, together with AI tools, deliver output of both high quality and high quantity. He refers to these as 'High Agency People': the kind of people who 'get stuff done'.

He goes on to point out that in the past, not all intern projects ended up being useful to NBIM. This year is different, with every single project being implemented in the organisation.

The AI blessing

To many, Tangen may seem overly eager about AI and its uses. He traces his enthusiasm back to 2022, when he hosted Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, on NBIM's podcast. There, Altman promised annual productivity gains of 20% through the use of AI.

'If you keep a 20% productivity gain for a bit over two years, you've made a gain of 50%. If you're 50% ahead of your competitors, they're never catching up. They're going bankrupt,' Tangen says.

The technology is clearly too good for the NBIM CEO to pass up, and early adoption is important to him.

Use cases

After some words from Tangen, the audience is introduced to Kristoffer Gulestø, an NHH alumni. He works as a data scientist at the fund and is part of the new AI team. Sadly, no women are on this team yet, but Tangen aims to change that.

According to Gulestø, it is important for a competitive employer like NBIM to have access to the right toys, or tools if you will, to recruit competent people.

At NBIM, he tells the students, they use Claude Code, OpenCode and Gemini daily. He goes on to describe how the fund accesses the models through centralised LLM API (application programming interface) platforms, where all capabilities are available in one portal. He also highlights the use of MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers, which connect LLMs to conventional tools like GitHub and Snowflake.

Furthermore, NBIM has created an 'agent factory' available to all employees, to encourage the use of AI agents.

'It's fun, huh?' Tangen asks when talking about the agents.

Gulestø elaborates on the use cases, focusing mainly on the number of companies that can be evaluated and how quickly. In NBIM's approach, AI carries out a preliminary and a secondary risk assessment, and a human is brought in if both stages indicate signs of uncertainty.

NBIM also uses the technology to identify sectors in distress, find resilient companies within them, and buy solid shares at distressed, cheap prices. Machine learning algorithms are also used to predict corporate events, allowing NBIM to move early on them, Gulestø tells us.

Tangen then adds his own perspective.

'Using what you learn here at NHH, we apply it to 22,000 billion NOK. Out the other end comes a lot of profits. Cool, huh?'

Questions from the audience

After a thorough lecture from the two men at NBIM, the floor opens up for questions.

One student asks Tangen about the deterioration of shareholder rights in large companies, especially AI companies.

'It's really bad. Being on the stock exchange is kind of a nuisance,' he says, explaining why this development is happening.

Some in the audience also fear that markets may become completely solved by AI systems. Both NBIM representatives agree that markets are moving towards such a state, but still believe in human capital.

'You still need the right humans to stay competitive,' Gulestø points out.

Tangen also speaks about the balance between regulation and innovation, and expresses frustration with the situation in both the EU and the US.

'In the EU, they have a lot of regulation and no innovation. In the US, they have a lot of innovation, but no regulation,' he says.

On questions on risk, Tangen is clear.

'The risks of not riding this wave are higher than the risks of riding it. We've also made a lot of money in this market, and we might have to give some back,' he says in a level-headed manner.

Despite EU regulations, poor shareholder rights and potential risks, Tangen is positive about AI in Norway.

'Norway is the perfect place to implement AI. We have a high level of education, high digitisation and, most importantly, we hate working,' he concludes.