Sofia Oguli is at the forefront of Blackstone’s AI transformation.
Blackstone is one of the biggest backers of bets on AI, investing more than $150 billion in bets on data centers and plans to create a “McKinsey for AI” to spread LLM-based transformation across the economy.
In her role as an applied AI engineer on the Private Equity team, she is one of approximately 50 full-time employees embedded within Blackstone’s investment and operations teams to prototype AI tools that make their jobs easier.
These prototypes can be part of a company-wide effort, or they can just be a way to find the most efficient solution to a problem.
“The power of technology is building practical and impactful solutions that can support as many users as we need and address many of the problems we are trying to tackle,” she said.
Doing this doesn’t just mean building a product, it means finding the “alignment” between the needs of different parts of the business. In other words, many meetings are required.
Sophia Oguli, Applied AI Engineer at Blackstone. black stone
Oguri spoke to Business Insider about his life on the front lines of AI transformation, his path to becoming an applied AI engineer, and tips for succeeding in AI.
What is your job like?
Oguri’s day typically begins at 8:30 a.m. with back-to-back “start-up” meetings across the business and technology teams. She works with deal teams to understand their workflow and shares it with technical and engineering teams.
Building applications is core to Oguri’s role, but her meetings make sure she’s building something that’s actually useful.
But much of her understanding comes from observation. She is typically embedded on a day-to-day basis with a private equity team, “sitting down with fellow analysts and colleagues and working on actual deals,” she said.
This approach grew out of the company’s data analytics model, where data analysts work with teams to help solve problems. It has now been expanded to include generative AI. Mr. Oguri works specifically with the private equity and infrastructure teams.
Mr. Oguri began his full-time career at Blackstone in 2022 in traditional data science, before becoming a founding member of the Applied AI research team.
Oguri’s work involves many meetings. black stone
A lot of her job is translating the needs of different teams into each other, but she’s also a “builder” who “practices technology” and actually builds solutions, she said.
“I start by observing their workflow and identifying the most time-consuming manual tasks,” she said. “From there, I quickly prototype the solution and often write a Python tool within the same week to test with my team.”
These prototypes can help inform private equity teams’ broader AI strategies. Mr. Oguri will help develop and present this strategy to senior private equity leaders along with other members of the team. Some of the tools her team has worked on are incorporated into company-wide tools like Secure Chat and Document AI.
She also supports portfolio companies on AI and data strategies and spoke to top technology executives from Blackstone portfolio companies at the firm’s late 2025 Portfolio Company Technology Conference.
Mornings are often busy with meetings, she said, but afternoons are the best time to actually build the prototypes that will eventually grow into company-wide tools.
However, her schedule may change if there is a notable product launch, new AI release, or real deal.
path to role
Oguri first came to Blackstone as a summer analyst in 2021, prior to his senior year at Cornell University. But long before that, she had been looking for responsibility and was looking for a career as a student that required her to make “real decisions with real consequences.”
She is the chief technology officer of Student Agency Inc., a $2.5 million student-run business and the oldest independent student-run business in the country, where she helped move the company’s operations online during the pandemic. She also served as a teaching assistant for advanced operations research and data science courses.
And although she graduated to join Blackstone a few months before the launch of ChatGPT started the LLM revolution, she sees AI as a way for students to “own” their ideas and bring them to life.
Her biggest advice for college students is to actually spend time building one product that solves a problem end-to-end.
“I don’t think it needs to be particularly innovative or perfect, but showing how to think and how to execute is powerful,” Oguri said.
She also recommends learning the fundamentals of software architecture and the mathematical foundations of an LLM, rather than just “coding everything in the air,” even if those tools are helpful.
Since she joined Blackstone, AI has changed the world and its use has become more mainstream than ever before. But she said there are still many ways to achieve what drew her to applied AI work. It is the ability to change people’s daily life experiences, improve their quality of life, and “help people spend less time on repetitive tasks and more time on strategic work.”