Millennium Management is expanding the use of artificial intelligence across its workforce by offering every employee a personalised AI assistant designed to learn their working preferences and handle routine tasks, according to a report by BusinessInsider.

The $97bn hedge fund has already deployed about 1,600 of the AI assistants, known as "digital twins", and is now making the technology available to its more than 7,000 employees, including investment professionals.

The assistants are designed to work as individual digital counterparts rather than automated versions of their users. Employees can communicate with their twin by email, while the system can be given access to specific applications and data to perform tasks such as research, meeting preparation and inbox management.

According to Diana Meditz, Millennium's AI product manager, each twin has its own identity, email address, permissions and audit trail. Employees determine which systems their assistant can access, while separate environments and controls are designed to restrict each twin's access to its designated user's information.

The digital assistants cannot make decisions on behalf of employees. Instead, they are intended to reduce administrative work and allow staff to delegate repetitive activities.

Meditz said her own digital twin reviews AI-related news overnight and scans her inbox for relevant internal updates before the start of the working day.

Millennium chief information officer Vlad Torgovnik was the first employee to use a digital twin as part of an initial test of the technology. The firm subsequently expanded the programme to more than 150 employees, with 97% of participants interacting with their twin each day, according to Millennium.

New employees are now given access to a digital twin when they join the firm.

Millennium is also developing a separate category of AI systems known as "AI teammates", which are designed to support entire teams rather than individual employees. Like the digital twins, these systems have their own identities and are intended to operate autonomously within predefined boundaries.