For all the hand-wringing about what AI will do to the white-collar workforce, the technology might not be impressive enough to replace the core work done in the finance industry yet, but Wall Street pros say it definitely has its uses.
“If you’re doing it for self-education, it’s one thing, but I think it’s quite hard to rely on a chatbot for fiduciary purposes if you’re facing clients,” said Maurits Pot, the founder of Tema ETFs.
Other cite issues with AI “hallucinations,” which can be a headache if you need to be precise with figures and data.
“You don’t use AI to do sophisticated things,” said David Trainer, the founder of New Constructs, adding: “It’s more trouble for me to use something and find out later that it’s hallucinated than it is for me to just go get it from the source to begin with.”
And yet, a lot of people are using AI, and there are some creative ways Wall Street pros are deploying the technology.
Here’s how Wall Streeters say they are using chatbots to save them time and get an edge.
Building your own Warren Buffett
One of the more interesting examples I heard comes from Lance Roberts, the CIO at RIA Advisors, which oversees around $2 billion. His team programmed 14 different AI agents to think like top investors, including Warren Buffett, Stanley Druckenmiller, Benjamin Graham, John Bogle, Cathie Wood, and others.
These agents provide insights on anything from their views on the S&P 500 to individual stocks, Roberts said, and can help provide different perspectives when thinking about an investment case.
Summarizing relevant books and giving feedback on papers
Another use case comes from Rob Arnott, the famed investor and founder of Research Affiliates. Last year at around this time, he was going to have his team read Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War” to prepare for Trump’s second term. Trump has cited it as one of his favorite books, with one of its main takeaways being to find a way to get what you want without fighting. Instead, Arnott figured he’d send them a ChatGPT summary to ensure they’d get the main takeaways without having to take too much time out of their busy schedules.
Arnott has also said he uses AI for detailed feedback on his papers, with his preferred chatbot being Perplexity.
“Perplexity is my preferred search engine, and has been for a couple of years now,” he said in an email. “I try the other LLM’s from time to time. The nice thing about Perplexity is that it’s an AI of AIs: it chooses which AI is best suited to whatever question I have.”
Making presentations
Its biggest use case, however, seems to be administrative tasks, or assignments that lower-level staffers might have once tackled. As Seth Klarman, the CEO of Baupost Group, described it last summer: “essentially a capable assistant, a summer intern.”
David Elder, a wealth manager at Merit Financial Advisors, gave an example of a smaller task he might use a chatbot to save time on.
“I’m doing a presentation right now on intellectual property,” Elder, who uses multiple chatbots including ChatGPT, Copilot, and Gamma, said. “I can have an interview with me and an intellectual property or business attorney, talk about it from multiple angles, dump that kind of recording into an AI, and turn that into a presentation.”
Organizing notes
For Chase Doyen, who works in business development for the London Stock Exchange Group in New York, it’s an organizational tool. His firm has a subscription to Claude, Anthropic’s chatbot.
“I use it for administrative tasks mostly,” Doyen said. “I use it for organizing and planning out my day. I use it for organizing my notes. If I write down a lot for a presentation I’m in or a meeting, Claude cleans it up very well.”
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