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Bio, Work & Ideas

Hari Kumar

Conference affiliation: Contour Asset Management

Hari Kumar is Head of AI and Data Science at Contour Asset Management, a long/short equity investment firm focused on technology, media and telecommunications. He joined the firm in February 2026. Contour’s strategy combines industry analysis with research into individual companies to identify investment opportunities arising from technological change.

Before Contour, Kumar worked on Meta’s data science team, focusing on recommendation algorithms and growth prediction. Earlier, he worked in Boston Consulting Group’s technical enablement pillar. His career spans consulting, consumer technology and investment management, with his work at Meta centered on predicting growth and shaping recommendations.

Kumar earned a Master of Science in Engineering in Computer Science and a Bachelor of Science in Finance from the University of Pennsylvania.

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1 conference talk

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18:24

Proving Alpha: How a Hedge Fund Measures AI's ROI - Hari Kumar, Contour Asset Management

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Key ideas

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Hari Kumar explains how Contour Asset Management compares research workflows, tracks cost per useful insight and counts the time lost to broken tools while waiting for investment outcomes to emerge.

  • Document research with and without AI at the level of data sources, delegated activities, conclusions and time spent. Contour’s concrete example follows one company between two earnings reports.
    3:05 ↗
  • Process improvements can become visible before investment returns. A thesis may take six months or a year to affect a stock price.
    5:05 ↗
  • Agents can preserve the usefulness of earlier research by checking shelved ideas against the market and bringing them back to the analyst, portfolio manager and trader.
    7:18 ↗
  • Cost per useful insight connects analyst effort, the tools used, the ideas produced and their eventual outcomes. Tool failures and learning time belong in that accounting.
    10:35 ↗

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