Is every IB using Claude now?
Do you use Claude for excel / ppt? I hear many funds are using it to build models and memos. Curious if it’s made it into most IBs by now. Analysts should breeze by using this right?
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I'd be very surprised if any funds are actually using it for anything more important than skimming CIMs and doing background market research. Why would I want to give a model to a tool that regularly hallucinates? I need it to be right.
Gov uses it for high stakes military operations but it's not good enough for your little LBO?
Government has infinite money and isn’t accountable to anyone.
And no, it’s not good enough for my LBO because it’s not perfect when I’m expected to be, now fuck off.
The government uses it for information gathering, which is exactly what this guy suggested for IB. It isn’t executing military operations.
My MM has an enterprise license for Claude and Gemini that pretty much all the juniors use heavily. Pretty good at slide design / commentary generation / Excel formula vetting. Our bullpen also use it a ton for market research (e.g., an MD asks you to lay out the competitive landscape for a pitch). What used to be 2+ hours of scraping Google for random family-owned MM shitcos is now 30 seconds which is pretty great.
We don’t have Excel plugin access yet but they told us they’re piloting it and aiming to get it to us in the next few months. Anecdotally I’ve heard from connections at some MFs that they use the plugin heavily for data analysis (know an Ares associate that did basically his entire portco quarterly KPI deck with it in one night). Scary times
Honestly this sounds awesome. I know we might all lose our jobs but in the meantime AI is replacing all my least favourite parts of the job.
Fuuuuuuck. We’re cooked
meanwhile BB's are stuck with non-web based copilot... feel we're falling behind
Yeah. I actually think the degree to which a firm leans into and embraces AI in the next few years will have a real impact on the landscape and will become a real selling point, even if they don’t explicitly market it. It will come out through junior word of mouth anyways. If you’re recruiting, would you rather work at a firm that has heavily invested in AI tools and encourages their use vs. a bank that is still stuck on bloated 2022 tech? Interesting to think about. Wonder if / when it gets to a point that banks sell it as a differentiating point to clients as well.
I’m in our pilot. It adds more value than most of our analysts / associates. If I were a junior banker I would either step up materially or consider an alternative line of work.
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This is 100% true and is becoming more evident every day. Denying it does not change the reality
How much does it cost and which model is best for finance/modeling?
Been using the excel plugin, lost for words. AI usage will become a key KPI for promotion / not getting laid off.
Can you share some examples of what you've been using it for so far?
^ interested as well.
Finding comps / precedents (can customize and have as many filters, variables, and details as you want), summarizing legal docs (leases, material agreements, customer contracts, permits, environmental, etc.), finding buyers that own xyz type of asset in whatever industry, drafting ideas for industry decks, identifying key industry themes, heck can even paste your complex formula from excel and ask what's wrong with it and why it's returning x value and not y
These are all the most awful, time-consuming parts of the job. Love that I can spend my time elsewhere. Too much to do.
Ye agreed, but these are also 60-70% of what most analysts do (at least first years), and these tools are only getting better every day at an exponential pace
Genuine question, are your not concerned about the utility of doing some of these things completely on your own for learning’s sake?
In tech, the coding agents are fantastic for younger professionals (willing to change) but already have 3-4 years of work experience, but there’s new grads who only know how to vibe code and such: they turn code that works, but it’s sloppy and hard to audit; 10k lines of AI code but the system would work just fine with a fraction it etc.
What’s the threshold between lubricant to help you do your own craft better and a crutch to where everyone’s skills would just devolve to the ability of the model itself?
a) I already learned how to do these things manually, and now i can just run it more efficiently, and often don't need an analyst to do it at all
b) you sound like a guy that would say we shouldn't use calculators because we'll forget how to do the math in our head - a lot of manual tasks are MEANT to be automated, and no you don't always need to know the nuts and bolts of how everything works; the more details get abstracted the better, that is how technology works
a) Great, you’ve acknowledged you’re in the first 1st analogous group to the engineers. Mid-level professionals who understand the core skills are primed to use the tech well because they know the core skills
b) what a disingenuous cop out to avoid thinking about the second order effects on a workforce here. Your calculator comparison doesn’t even hold up — obviously we don’t use fucking calculators but you still need to understand basic arithmetic don’t you?
Try giving a 4 year old a calculator and see how well they handle a basic algebra problem. Do you suggest we stop teaching math in primary school because now you can just ask the AI and can ensure they’ll always get the number right instead of fiddling with trying to teach children how to count? If you don’t have the range to consider what negative externalities we need to mitigate in order to truly see long-term benefits of a new tech then just say that
BTW you guys can argue with me, or deal with reality and look at what Block just did - i don't care either way, best of luck to us all
Horrible example. Block is a joke of a company whose stock hasn’t moved in ages, has no moat, is getting shit on by competitors, is heavily invested in crypto which just tanked, and hired like 10k people during Covid.
Lol ok if you truly think AI won't have any significant implications for white collar work GLHF
Can confirm the Claude plug in is extremely useful. Adds bells and whistles to analysis i’m too lazy to add. Great to use for outputs for a monthly deck. Definitely still makes plenty of mistakes but if you are good at prompting you can become an output machine. Highly recommend everyone digging in now. Given AI will always need prompting / guidance for the foreseeable future, the better you get at it the more efficient you will seem and the further you’ll go. Today the analysis from start to finish probably takes the same amount of time but I can respond to emails / read CIMs while Claude is thinking. Game changer.
I have a sneaking suspicion that Claude is paying finance platforms (litquidity, high yield Harry, WSO) or using bots to generate buzz about their capabilities. But I'm at a BB and all we have is copilot (which is great but underwhelming) so can't speak from experience
We have Copilot too and I think it is extremely disappointing for PPT related work. It sounds like Claude can actually make slides but haven't had access to it.
Don’t forget boringbiz
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