AI Adoption in Finance: a human-verified, stage-classified corpus of institutional investors and its human-AI disagreement record

A public, sourced classification of where institutional investors sit on AI adoption — pensions, sovereign-wealth funds, endowments, asset managers and hedge funds — placed on a four-stage bar (exploring / piloting / scaling / embedded) from public evidence alone. An AI research agent drafts every row and proposes a stage; a human verifies every row against its cited sources before it publishes. Because each review decision is recorded, the rate at which the human and the agent disagree is published as data rather than asserted: see data/agreement.json. Those figures are anchored, non-independent agreement and should not be read as an inter-rater reliability estimate — the reviewer saw the proposed stage before deciding. Institutions assessed against the methodology whose public record did not support a stage are published by name with reasons in data/not_classified.json, so the corpus can be read as a rate rather than a highlight reel. Evidence in Chinese, Japanese and Korean is stored verbatim and rendered in English at display time. Licensing: the data files in data/ are CC BY 4.0; the code in this repository is MIT. This record is registered under CC BY 4.0 because the corpus is the citable artifact. Coverage is not a sample of any defined population — institutions enter through research passes, not a sampling frame — so every figure describes this corpus and none is an industry rate. Independence. (a) Independent research. This project (the “Project”) is an independent, open-source, non-commercial research project by its author, Jiajun Ma (the “Author”), carried out in the Author’s individual capacity. The Author is the sole author and owner of its corpus and methodology. (b) No institutional affiliation. The Project is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or funded by any employer or other institution, and it does not represent the views or positions of any employer or institution. Every view and classification in it is the Author’s alone. (c) Not a business or a service. The Project is not operated as a business or a service and has not been carried out for or on behalf of any employer or client. To date it has generated no revenue, has charged no fees, carried no advertising, accepted no sponsorship and sold no access, and the Author has received no compensation in connection with it. (d) Open licences. The code is licensed under the MIT License and the data under CC BY 4.0. Use of either by others is governed by those licences alone; the Project charges nothing for such use, and the Author has derived no revenue or compensation from it. (e) Public sources only. No non-public information from the Author’s professional work informs any classification, and institutions with which the Author has a professional affiliation are excluded from coverage entirely. The Project was built without the use of any employer’s resources or working time. (f) No advice. Nothing in the Project constitutes investment, legal or other professional advice. Statement current as of 27 September 2026. It is updated whenever any fact in it changes.