Why Nicolai Tangen Made Every Employee Use AI — And Won Big

If you ran a $2 trillion investment fund with just 700 employees, you might already think you were pretty efficient.

But for Nicolai Tangen, CEO of Norges Bank Investment Management (NBIM), “efficient” wasn’t enough. He’s a vocal believer in AI’s potential — the kind who’ll sing its praises at every conference. So in the past year, he did something bold: he required every single employee to start using AI in their daily work.

The results?

  • 20% jump in productivity
  • 213,000 work hours saved — in one year
  • A cultural shift that’s rewiring how this giant operates

And according to Tangen, it’s only the beginning.

AI Everywhere — But Without a Rulebook

Interestingly, Tangen didn’t tell people exactly how to use AI. He told them to figure it out for themselves. The mandate: use Claude (Anthropic’s AI assistant) and see how it can help your role.

The experiments began.

  • Portfolio managers started dumping massive Excel files into Claude, asking plain-language questions instead of wrestling with complex formulas.
  • Risk analysts began feeding it transcribed multi-hour calls with company executives, letting AI extract the key insights.
  • News-tracking analysts — the ones who monitor thousands of investments across nearly 20 languages — automated much of their daily grind. Now, AI scans global coverage, flags relevant updates, and serves up clean summaries in minutes.

“We use AI for information gathering,” Tangen said simply. But in practice, it meant whole swaths of work were now automated.

Even High-Stakes Decisions Got the AI Treatment

When NBIM needs to decide how to vote on executive pay packages at companies it invests in, the process involves reading dozens of pages of dense governance reports.

Now?

  • All documents go into Claude.
  • Clear instructions tell the AI what to look for.
  • It returns recommendations that match human decisions 95% of the time.

Tangen estimates that if NBIM competes against companies that don’t use AI, they’ll outperform them by 50% in productivity.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” he says. “A situation where you can move so far ahead of your competitors.”

What He Doesn’t Talk About

Of course, Tangen isn’t broadcasting the mistakes — and there must have been some. AI can hallucinate, misread data, or confidently present nonsense. But NBIM didn’t just throw the tech at problems blindly. They built safeguards:

  • Human review on all code (at least two people sign off).
  • No sensitive personal data or active trading info goes into cloud AI models.
  • Humans remain involved in every AI-assisted decision.

These guardrails prevented major disasters — and the productivity gains were big enough to outweigh the occasional hiccup.

Making It Stick

The biggest reason this didn’t fizzle out? NBIM went all-in on embedding AI into the culture.

  • Everyone had to use it — no opt-outs.
  • A dedicated “AI Enablement” team of six roamed the company, coaching people and sparking new use cases.
  • Forty AI Ambassadors became internal champions, running seminars, workshops, and training sessions.

Tangen’s mantra: “You have to keep attacking the organization from every angle.”

Nearly half the company now writes code with AI assistance. And going forward, anyone hired into NBIM will be expected to be AI-fluent from day one.

When AI Frees Up Time

So what happens when AI takes over hours of routine work?

Tangen’s answer: employees should “think more and make better decisions.”

It’s a perfect example of what I’ve called the Agentic Age — where AI agents handle major chunks of work, but humans still guide, question, and supervise. The real winners will be professionals who:

  • Know their field deeply
  • Can frame the right questions for AI
  • Can spot when it’s wrong
  • Aren’t afraid to code (at least a little)

The Lesson for Everyone Else

What NBIM did isn’t just for trillion-dollar funds.

Law firms, accounting agencies, manufacturing companies — all can apply the same playbook:

  1. Mandate AI use
  2. Let employees experiment
  3. Provide training and internal champions
  4. Keep humans in the loop
  5. Measure the wins and double down

The opportunities are everywhere — for those ready to seize them.

NBIM’s AI push shows what’s possible when leadership makes AI adoption non-negotiable and backs it with culture, training, and trust. The productivity gap between AI-powered companies and laggards is already opening. The question is: which side of that gap will you be on?

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