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Artificial intelligence has quickly become a tool many companies are looking to utilize in the coming years. According to Forbes, 64% of businesses believe that AI can help increase productivity — though many workers are afraid that its rising prevalence in the workplace could reduce the number of available jobs.
In late January at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Yahoo Finance’s Executive Editor Brian Sozzi asked a variety of economic leaders for their perspectives on AI’s place in the workforce — and they shared their wide-ranging takes on the Opening Bid podcast.
Here are some of the highlights.
Morgan Stanley CEO and chairman Ted Pick sees AI as a tool to take care of routine tasks, such as taking notes. But ultimately, it will not replace the human aspect that makes many businesses thrive.
“Yes, the AI is super important,” he said on Opening Bid. “It brings a ton of efficiency to the cost structure and [is] disruptive to the mainframe and that type of thing. You don’t need to write your notes because someone will spit it out. 20 hours of certain note debriefs is taken down by 80% … [but] we still need the human orderly. That’s never going to change.”
While AI may make certain day-to-day tasks easier to complete, he insisted that much of his business is relationship-driven.
“We talk about rigor, humility, and partnership, and if you don’t have a timeline of a relationship, nobody’s going to be all that impressed,” Pick said. “You worry about the little details. You may be off — you get a question wrong, you give advice [that] is not quite right — but you correct [it]. And you’re focused on that client over time.”
Nasdaq CEO Adena Friedman also felt that AI’s biggest pull is going to be its ability to take care of more mundane tasks.
“AI can write those reports,” she said. “So you give them the facts and the AI can write the report. That just is a massive time savings. Same with other regulatory reporting. So there’s a lot … where the technology can be used to take out a lot of very boring, rote work.”
She also predicted that AI will be a particularly useful tool in curating recommendations for an individual’s investment portfolio and answering client questions.
“AI [will continue] to drive interesting ways to engage with investors using algorithm AI to make predictive decisions,” she said.
