The CIO Who Codes: Al Hemmingsen on Weaving AI into the Fabric of a Multi-Generational Single Family Office

Al Hemmingsen, CIO of a prominent US-based single family office, joins The Agentic Allocator to share what hands-on AI adoption looks like from inside an institutional family office. Al is the only CIO we know of in the LP world actively publishing open-source code on GitHub for use by fellow allocators.

In this episode, Al walks through how vibe coding with Claude Code became a serious tool for unlocking legacy data and automating workflows, how he is building a culture of accountability across his team, and why the LP that gets to the best GPs first has a competitive edge that only widens over time.

He also makes one of the sharpest points we have heard on the competitive stakes: some aspects of this work should be shared freely with peers, but the ability to process information faster than other LPs, build higher-quality manager meeting lists, and get to the best GPs before they fill their calendars at conferences, is a genuine edge. If you do not build it, someone else will.

What You'll Learn:

• How a background in SQL and Visual Basic at business school laid the foundation for a career of hobbyist coding and eventually full vibe coding with Claude Code
• Why the single best measure of AI ROI at a family office is not efficiency gains but tasks that were previously too expensive or simply not feasible
• How Al thinks about the boundary between enterprise systems of record and the custom scripts that live in between them
• The psychological dimension of AI adoption: how to take existential fear off the table so your team can actually engage with the technology
• The autopilot accountability principle: why the person who creates an AI tool is always responsible for what it does, regardless of what the machine decided
• How a standing Monday meeting agenda item and a shared Microsoft environment for corporate-owned apps is building a firm-wide culture of AI experimentation
• Why the investment case for AI comes down to the widest top-of-funnel possible: seeing more managers, filtering more efficiently, and getting to the best GPs faster than peers who are not augmented
• Why sharing freely with peers and competing are not contradictory, and how to think about the line between the two

About Al Hemmingsen:

Al Hemmingsen is the CIO of a prominent US-based single family office with a history going back to the mid-20th century. He has been at the helm for the past decade, managing a multi-generational pool of capital with a quasi-perpetual mandate. Al is one of the most hands-on AI adopters in the institutional family office world and is the only CIO in the LP space, that we’re aware, of actively publishing open-source code on GitHub for use by fellow allocators.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by Al Hemmingsen in this interview are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views, positions, or policies of any organization with which he is or has been affiliated.