A chance encounter in 2015 led Steve Schwarzman, the septuagenarian private equity billionaire, to become one of the biggest and most unlikely champions of artificial intelligence.
On a bus ride in Beijing with other global business leaders, the Blackstone chief executive happened to sit next to Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma, who started talking about AI. The technology, he explained, would soon change drug development and education and reshape how people across all industries do their jobs.
