AI IB/Finance Job Risk

I'm curious what everyone here thinks about the risk of AI to their jobs. 

2-3years ago, ChatGPT could just about write a crappy email. Now you have Veo 3 making fairly realistic videos, Claude 4 apparently doing a 7h shift (and more broadly emailing/researching etc for you).

AI agents who automate the 'admin' side of jobs are all the rage currently. What happens (as has happened in the last 2 years) when they develop further/higher level cognitive functions. Your advice is not special if AI can do it better and at near 0 cost. 

Another way I see this is the reduced returns on intelligence as time goes on. Most white-collar jobs rely on this and with advances in robotics, blue-collar jobs too. 

I find it hard to comprehend what the masses will do as the competency and integrates of AI increases. Imagine AI Agents (Like Manus/Operator/Claude today) improve further in the next 1-2 years and in 5 years they are widely adopted. Job loss would be rife, social security spending through the roof, GDP and spending through the floor and valuations through the floor at the same time. What then for big tech with its grand data centre building plans?

Seems far-fetched, but also not at the same time.

7 Comments
 

Need to get big Donnie to hate AI and we good! 

Also - tougher to replace tradespeople than a banker. But My wider worry here is the economy is cyclical. If we simply ousted some predictable workflow professions like administrators/paralegals/PAs tomorrow -  the knock on of this is huge if they don't get follow-on jobs. 

The opposite of a tin-foil person but I think significant progress > significant job loss > protest. Will be interesting seeing this unfold. 

Buying property and equities doesn't help when people can't pay you rent and valuations dive head first off a cliff. 

 

Honestly, I don't see a risk. This may just be an RX guy's perspective but here are my thoughts:

  1. IB is all about relationships at the senior level. Can't replace that with AI
  2. There are a lot of things AI cannot do that I have to do. ChatGPT cannot run my pro forma analysis on 4 different targeted capital structures. It cannot read the credit docs because those are privileged (there are way more private companies that go bankrupt then public, for obvious reasons). I for example can't access any AI on my work computer. I'd need to use my personal then send it back to myself somehow. THe firm is developing an internal tool I believe but that'll take forever to get good. The only internal tool I have heard of that is actually incredibly helpful is McKinsey's proprietary google thing. Heard that from a friend there idek what it is this was years ago.
  3. Excel caused an increase in productivity and # of bankers needed, not a decrease. Just means we can do more work. I'd expect some consolidation in a decade or so. Some of the weaker banks get bought out, teams merge, obviously redundancies, but on a net basis the teams can now do more business and grow. Productivity grows, hiring occurs, repeat. Obviously cyclical but this is a simplified version of my view.
 

I think AI is bigger than people realise. 

Excel is a tech that allowed for greater output. 

AI is basically just intelligence. It's intelligence that getting better and cheaper. When/IF it outperforms everyone, everyone is not needed (for work at least). 

Our society isn't structured for it and it's all happening super fast. This doesn't give society time to respond. 

 

It literally cannot replace relationships mate and it doesn't have access to proprietary information from said relationships

 
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