Despite all the talk about what AI will bring to the white-collar workforce, Wall Street experts say the technology may not yet be impressive enough to replace core jobs performed in the financial industry, but Wall Street experts say it definitely has its uses.
“If you’re doing it for self-education, it’s a different story, but if you’re customer-facing, I think it’s pretty difficult to rely on chatbots for fiduciary purposes,” said Maurits Pott, founder of Tema ETF.
Some have cited problems with AI’s “hallucinations,” which can cause headaches when numbers and data need to be handled accurately.
“We don’t use AI to do anything sophisticated,” said New Constructs founder David Trainer, adding, “For me, it’s more troublesome to try something and then find out it was an illusion than to go and get it from the source in the first place.”
Still, many people are using AI, and there are some creative ways Wall Street professionals are implementing the technology.
Here’s what Wall Streeters say they’re using chatbots to save time and gain an edge.
Build your own Warren Buffett
One interesting example I heard was from Lance Roberts, CIO of RIA Advisors, which oversees about $2 billion. His team programmed 14 different AI agents to think like top investors, including Warren Buffett, Stanley Druckenmiller, Benjamin Graham, John Bogle, and Cathie Wood.
Roberts said these agents can provide insights on everything from their views on the S&P 500 to individual stocks, helping provide a different perspective when considering investment cases.
Related book summaries and paper feedback
Another use case comes from Rob Arnott, a well-known investor and founder of Research Affiliates. This time last year, I was getting my team to read Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War” in preparation for President Trump’s second term. President Trump has cited the book as one of his favorite books, saying one of its main lessons is to find a way to get what you want without fighting. Instead, Arnott wanted to send them an overview of ChatGPT to ensure they understood the main points without taking too much time into their busy schedules.
Arnott also uses AI for detailed feedback on papers and says his favorite chatbot is Perplexity.
“Perplexity is my favorite search engine and has been for several years,” he said in an email. “I try other LLMs from time to time. The good thing about Perplexity is that it is an AI of AIs. It chooses the best AI for any question I have.”
give a presentation
However, its biggest use case seems to be administrative tasks, or assignments that lower-level staff may have previously worked on. “Essentially a talented assistant, a summer intern,” Baupost Group CEO Seth Claman described last summer.
David Elder, wealth manager at Merritt Financial Advisors, gave examples of smaller tasks where chatbots might be used to save time.
“I’m currently giving presentations on intellectual property,” said Elder, who uses multiple chatbots including ChatGPT, Copilot, and Gamma. “You can meet with me and an intellectual property or business lawyer, talk about it from different angles, and feed those recordings into an AI that turns it into a presentation.”
Organizing notes
For Chase Doyen, who works in business development at the London Stock Exchange Group in New York, it’s an organizational tool. His company subscribes to Anthropic’s chatbot, Claude.
“I use it primarily for administrative tasks,” Doyen says. “I use it to organize and plan my day. I also use it to organize my notes. If I write down a lot for a presentation or a meeting, Claude does a great job of cleaning it up.”
