Inside SITFO's Skynet Group: Ryan Kulig on Building AI Into a $4.7B Permanent Fund

Ryan Kulig, Finance and Operations Officer at SITFO, the Utah School and Institutional Trust Funds Office, joins The Agentic Allocator to share how a $4.7 billion-dollar permanent fund for Utah's public education programs became one of the earliest institutional allocators to systematically build AI into the way it operates.

For the past 16 months, Ryan has led a rigorous AI landscaping exercise at SITFO, evaluating vendors, building agentic workflows, and integrating AI into the operational fabric of the agency. As a member of several industry networks of leading endowments, foundations, and health systems, Ryan found that almost no one else in those communities was actively implementing AI, which only deepened his conviction that SITFO needed to lead.

Ryan walks through why SITFO moved past using AI to generate investment memos, which it found to be a commoditized solution, toward a cross functional platform that serves finance and operations, strategy and risk, and manager research. He explains the integration work required to connect AI to the CRM, benchmarking systems, performance vendors, email, and shared document storage, and why that unglamorous plumbing work is what makes the AI powerful. He also shares his view that institutional investors have been slow to adopt AI because they treat it as a productivity tool rather than a transformational technology, and why SITFO concluded that the cost of moving early outweighed the risk of waiting.

What You'll Learn:

• How SITFO grew from three people and an inherited portfolio of Vanguard mutual funds into a sophisticated allocator over its first ten years
• Why SITFO moved past using AI for investment memos, which it found to be a commoditized solution, toward a single cross functional platform serving finance and operations, strategy and risk, and manager research
• Why SITFO prioritized integrating AI with its existing CRM, benchmarking, and performance systems
• Why Ryan believes institutional investors have been slow to adopt AI because they treat it as a productivity tool rather than a transformational technology
• Why SITFO concluded that the cost of being early outweighed the risk of waiting, and what that meant in practice
• How SITFO built a pipeline tool that pulls documents from its CRM daily and screens managers against desirable metrics across asset classes
• Why low hanging fruit such as reviewing limited partnership agreements, populating subscription documents, and redlining NDAs frees the team for higher value work
• Why Ryan believes manager research is shifting back to a people business, with more time spent on reference checks and relationship building and less on memo writing
• Why SITFO's two most recent hires were chosen for technical skill rather than manager research background, and what that signals about where the team is headed
• Ryan's advice for peers earlier in their AI adoption journey: assess your resources and objectives first, then run a structured landscaping process
• How SITFO secured board and management support years in advance, including through an internal working group it calls the Skynet group
• The data integrity and integration challenges SITFO worked through, including cleaning its CRM and controlling permissions across email and shared drives

About Ryan Kulig:

Ryan Kulig is the Finance and Operations Officer at SITFO, the Utah School and Institutional Trust Funds Office, a $4.7 billion-dollar permanent fund to support Utah’s public education programs. Ryan joined SITFO in 2016 to manage office operations, portfolio administration, and investment analysis, and has spent the past 16 months leading the agency's AI landscaping and implementation effort. Before joining SITFO, he worked at Sax Angle Partners, specializing in fundamental and technical analysis of equity investments. Ryan holds a Bachelor of Business Administration in Global Business from the University of Portland and an MBA from the University of Southern California.