Dan Loeb, founder of New York-based hedge fund Third Point, said he underestimated how quickly AI could disrupt some businesses.
Loeb said on Thursday’s episode of the “Invest Like The Best” podcast that while Third Point was successful in betting against some companies affected by AI, it also misjudged AI’s ability to upend parts of the market that it had hoped would be more resilient.
“But what we made the mistake of, controversially, was thinking that AI was not really going to impact this part of the information services business, knowing full well that they had sensitive information,” Loeb said, adding that this was an important “investment lesson” of the past year.
Loeb said one way to help teams deal with the uncertainty around AI is to encourage them to use it in practice.
“Yeah, I mean, first of all, we all have to start using it. The only way to get better at this is to just use it,” Loeb said.
He added that his company’s employees have varying levels of technical expertise and experience.
“The experts we bring in are native computer scientists and approach this work as AI experts working on specific projects. They guide the team, but we also encourage everyone to use AI to find as many applications as possible,” he said.
He said the push to deploy AI reflects broader efforts to help employees continue to learn and adapt.
“As you know, I am obsessed with continuous improvement, both on an individual and organizational level,” Loeb said.
He pointed to Anthropic’s Claude as a tool that rewards effort and helps employees improve themselves.
“It makes you very autonomous and it’s like your ability, if you put in a lot of time and energy and effort, everything you put in comes back to you,” he said.
As part of encouraging teams to adopt AI, Loeb said employees regularly exchange best practices and share how they are leveraging the technology.
“You know, some people are running agents all night and using a lot of tokens. Others are probably like me and just using it for queries and stuff, but you know, we’re all deep into it,” he said.
Many other companies are also encouraging their employees to experiment with AI tools.
In July 2025, Business Insider’s Ashley Stewart reported that Microsoft is considering incorporating the use of AI into employee evaluations.
“AI is now a fundamental part of how we work,” Julia Lewson, head of Microsoft’s developer tools division, wrote in an internal email. “Like collaboration, data-driven thinking, and effective communication, the use of AI is no longer optional. It is critical for every role and at every level.”
In August 2025, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong announced that he had fired some employees who resisted the company’s push to use AI.
“I became an outlaw,” Armstrong said.