Asset managers and investors, including ARK Invest CEO Cathie Wood, are bullish on artificial intelligence.
As CEO and Chief Investment Officer of ARK Invest, Mr. Wood has significant exposure to both public and private AI companies through multiple portfolios.
At the Alts New York conference on Thursday, Wood said artificial intelligence is “the biggest catalyst for growth” in today’s market.
Wood’s comments during the Q&A session followed two days of discussion at the conference, where investor interest continued to return to the potential opportunities in artificial intelligence and how AI could disrupt the way they work. was announced shortly after.
During various discussions at the conference, Rockefeller University CIO Paula Volent said the company is looking at ways to add exposure to the technology to its portfolio. Franklin Templeton CEO Jenny Johnson said she wants to leverage AI in her tech stack.
Maurice Gordon, senior investment manager at Guardian Life Insurance, explores how to best deploy AI within operations, whether to generate annual reviews or to help allocators digest the flood of information they constantly receive. I am leading a project to evaluate.
ARK Invest’s portfolio reflects this growing interest.
The company will launch a public-private crossover venture fund in 2022. As of March 31, the new venture fund’s largest holding was Anthropic, an AI startup that built Claud, a chatbot similar to ChatGPT. The founder of Anthropic previously worked for OpenAI, the company that developed ChatGPT. The second largest holding is Replit, a browser-based coding platform that uses AI to code.
Meanwhile, Wood’s ARK Innovation ETF, ARK Autonomous Technologies & Robotics ETF, and ARK Next Generation ETF list AI-powered business automation company UiPath as a top holding as of March 31.
Wood said AI has the potential to help companies that rely too much on increasing revenue rather than profit. These companies are “starting to have a terrible wake-up call. If they have to lower their pricing, their margin structures are going to come under attack.”
Wood likens AI to an assembly line, arguing that companies could use it as a replacement for some workers, especially those in high-paying white-collar jobs.
“We pay about $32 trillion a year to knowledge workers, and we think that could drop by a third,” she said. “It’s mostly about automating very tedious jobs and actually promoting people to more value-added and therefore higher income-generating jobs.”
In addition to helping companies under pressure from earnings growth expectations, Wood also believes artificial intelligence and technological innovation could keep inflation in check. She believes this will happen soon, and in 2024 she predicts a negative CPI.
“Innovation is primed for deflation,” she said. “It’s essentially deflationary.”
