Invest with AI
00:37:32 · Brett Caughran
[00:37:32] S2: Yeah. Question for you, Doug, perspective on this two ks. Like in other areas, we've seen the sort of wrapper businesses become ascending again, like Harvey and Ligora. It sort of solves a lot of these, like, you know, model router and data wholesale aggregation, you know, commercial questions. You know, we've seen that in certain areas of finance, investment banking with Rogo really sort of ascendant. We haven't seen that yet in investing yet. Is that due to just the heterogeneity of our craft? Or do you think that's just a timing issue that we'll start to see that moment where you see some leaders, know, AlphaSense is sort of most adjacent to that, FactSet's building out an AI workspace, etcetera. Bloomberg's sort of perpetually eighteen months behind the frontier. But I'm curious if you've heard any interesting vendor stories you think we'll start to see know, sort of the right you... Your workspace being this finance specific workspace. I
00:38:36 · Doug Clinton
[00:38:36] S0: haven't heard any sort of under the radar companies or workspaces yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if somebody does try something here, and maybe it is an AlphaSense or or or somebody like that. It would sort of make sense they might try. We've talked to... And and I know, Kaye, you've talked to a ton of people in this space too. We've talked to a handful of pretty big asset managers over the past year just about, you know, other ways we could help them solve problems. And and one of the things that always is an issue or a sticking point with us working with them in any capacity is how do you get through compliance related issues? How do you get through sort of data sovereignty related issues and making sure that, you know, if they're sharing data with us in some way, our systems aren't using that data. That data's not available to any of their competitors maybe that are using the same system. And so these are all, I think, solvable problems, but I think they're they're easier to solve technically than they are to to solve organizationally, if that makes sense. And I wonder if that level of headache is the thing that's maybe holding us back more than, you know, just the reality that the technology is probably ready. It's, you know, are the institutions ready and and are very large financial institutions, which which I would argue and I hope you guys would agree are are maybe not the most aggressive as it pertains to, being innovative are just really slow to try to figure it out too.
00:40:05 · Khe Hy, Doug Clinton
[00:40:05] S1: Yeah. I I would say that I have seen a small resurgence of kind of like the wrapper vertical tools, this first pass tool or something that just gives me all the investor transcripts and so on, like cleans it up. You know, the three steps that you had to do in Claude to get to sanitize and get that data into the working format. And people are more open to those. But it's a little bit aside of your outside of your question, Brett. In terms of the platform, I think that people want to... People kind of want the iPhone of all this. It's like you push a button. Yeah. And there's a recognition that the minute it becomes the iPhone, then you've flattened out the edge into the product. Right? And so you need to have an iPhone that's more like an Android where you can customize this widget and this widget and this widget and this data source. But then you're kind of back at the same starting problem. And so I think that people are it's a big change management question. And I think one of the questions that I think larger firms will ask is like, what will get people to use the thing? Right. And if it's giving them an iPhone, then give them a damn iPhone. But I think that there are always going to be firms that are going to say like, I want you to have the iPhone and I want you to have Chrome because I want you to take that widget because we never do the widget that way. Yeah. [00:41:36] S0: Yeah.
00:41:36 · Doug Clinton, Brett Caughran, Khe Hy
[00:41:36] S0: Yeah. [00:41:37] S2: Yeah. And then that intersects the sort of obsolescence or the bitter lesson dynamic. Like, I look back to our fall twenty five curriculum where we were teaching people about chat GPT projects and downloading documents, uploading them, creating system prompts, all of this, which is, like, completely obsolete now. Yeah. So how do you deal with the change management problem while the sort of like the baseline of what needs to be changed is constantly evolving and continually up for debate? A hairy Lots [00:42:10] S1: of work for people like us. [00:42:11] S2: It's a hairy, it's a hairy problem.
00:42:11 · Brett Caughran, Doug Clinton
[00:42:11] S2: It's a hairy, it's a hairy problem. [00:42:13] S0: I think, you know, and I think a lot of lot of finance organizations, larger ones, even mid sized ones, I think they want to try to build this themselves in certain ways and for certain reasons. Compliance related, right? Control related, all these things. But working with somebody who knows and has a vision for it, I think, is super important. Kaye, I know you work with a lot of companies that are trying to figure this problem out. But the thing I think every firm needs to think about is they all need to operate a little bit like a start you know? And and to the extent that you're not willing to maybe break a few rules and and really try to figure things out in a unique way because things are changing so fast, I think it will put you behind the firms that are willing to take the risk, invest in the technology, invest in, you know, maybe even some of the governance risk and whatever else comes with that and understands what this new world looks like with LLMs being a much bigger part of all investment related processes.
00:43:13 · Brett Caughran
[00:43:13] S2: Yeah, the tricky part is if you look at the top 100 hedge funds, certainly near the top of that stack, I think most funds will build that in house. But even quite large funds, multi 8 figure you know, AUM, billion AUM funds, like there many of these teams, the investment teams are still quite small, you know, 10 to 15 people and, you know, relatively small internal IT teams. This is a big lift to build these, not just to build the first version, but sort of navigate this obsolescence risk and eval structures. And it's a it's not a it's not an immaterial expense. It's not an immaterial, you know, corporate strategy shift.