Why Ray Dalio says artificial intelligence has guided his decisions for decades

Ray Dalio has spent years telling people to write down their principles and turn good decision making into a repeatable process. Now he is spelling out just how far he took that idea inside Bridgewater Associates, saying that versions of artificial intelligence have been shaping his choices for around 40 years.

Dalio explains that, long before today’s chatbots and flashy AI demos, he and his team were trying to encode his thinking into computer programs. They broke down how he reacted to different market conditions, what data he watched and how he weighed risks. Those rules were then turned into algorithms that could be tested against history and refined over time.

In practice, that meant he was not relying only on gut instinct on any given day. The systems would flag patterns in interest rates, currencies or economic indicators and suggest actions that were consistent with his written principles. Dalio has often said that combining human judgement with machine-based logic helped Bridgewater reduce emotional bias and stay disciplined when markets were turbulent.

He now looks back at those early models and calls them a form of AI, even if the technology was far simpler than what exists today. The core idea was the same. Take what a skilled person does well, express it in clear rules and let computers apply those rules at speed and scale.