On a sunny morning in early June a High Court judge and officials and lawyers from the UK’s tax revenue authority convened at BlackRock’s London headquarters for a demonstration.

The event was a chance to show off BlackRock’s Aladdin software, the risk and operations platform that could be the future of the world’s largest asset manager. But the real purpose of the meeting, which lasted several hours, was to find out whether Aladdin is as revolutionary as its creators have claimed — whether it not only replaces functions previously performed by humans, but adds capabilities human fund managers never had.