Panel
Algorithms to Outcomes: AI's Impact in Finance | Global Conference 2025
Milken InstituteGregory Zuckerman, Andreas (Andy) Kreuz, Daniel Morillo, Katrina Paglia, Umesh Subramanian, Michael Zeltkevic
- Marsh McLennan targets a 15% increase in customer count and 40% growth in cross-selling within the coming period by identifying customer needs.
- WorldQuant intends to deploy AI as a comprehensive toolkit for researchers and portfolio managers to achieve greater breadth and scale in future operations.
- Freestone Growth Partners anticipates AI will transform banking microeconomics by lowering barriers and enabling the management of all 85,000 market participants and interactions instead of limited stock sets.
- Umesh Subramanian forecasts that AI will become a transformative, ubiquitous undercurrent in asset management, provided firms integrate necessary platforms, data, engineering, and culture.
- Andy Cruz projects that AI will likely replace human judgment in the near future, specifically within one to two years.
- Daniel Morello expects AI to serve as a feasibility machine that fundamentally alters workflows by expanding analytical capacity beyond traditional stock sets.
- Andy Cruz warns that AI could exaggerate risk and generate significant noise rather than signal if overfitting is not carefully managed.
- Freestone Growth Partners cautions that indiscriminate use of AI for summarization risks eliminating the nuanced reading required to generate unique alpha.
- Katrina Paglia highlights legal and confidentiality concerns, predicting the need for constant dialogue to ensure appropriate AI usage regarding proprietary information.
- Katrina Paglia anticipates regulatory actions will dictate how asset managers respond in the coming period.
- Andy Cruz foresees the development of system engineering control systems to treat autonomous agents as factories that require oversight.
- Katrina Paglia expects future AI tools to include data scrubbers that track inputs and record decisions for administrative purposes.
- Andy Cruz predicts that hiring processes will shift to emphasize a candidate's ability to rapidly adapt to new tools rather than their existing knowledge base.
- WorldQuant plans to recruit top graduates from universities to train them as quants capable of working effectively with AI.
- Katrina Paglia worries that the development of junior lawyers may suffer if AI automates manual tasks that currently form the basis of their career progression.
- Katrina Paglia anticipates that the profile of the next generation of attorneys will differ in five to ten years if they rely heavily on AI for drafting and summarization.
- Andy Cruz warns that transferring judgment to AI without human oversight creates risks of intellectual laziness and complacency.
- Andy Cruz warns against the danger of creating a culture where automated tools are used without intentional design or behavioral support.
- Umesh Subramanian notes that humans possess an infinite capacity to invent new jobs even as existing tasks become automated.
- Andy Cruz questions whether AI can predict the future or if alpha will remain with humans who can out-innovate algorithms.
- Katrina Paglia distinguishes between operational functions requiring precision and other areas where a probabilistic range of acceptable answers is sufficient.
- Andy Cruz identifies code completion, debugging, research summarization, and deriving meeting notes as immediate low-hanging fruit for AI applications.
- Katrina Paglia expects AI to significantly accelerate information gathering from sources like crypto Twitter where news often precedes traditional Bloomberg feeds.
- Umesh Subramanian suggests that long-term thinking will provide a sustainable advantage as speed and automation alone will eventually be competed away.
- Umesh Subramanian believes AI will not replace the talent pool and culture driving active investment approaches in any near future.
- Andy Cruz questions whether the alpha will remain with humans who can out-innovate algorithms or if AI can truly predict the future.
- Katrina Paglia expects older employees will adopt new technology once they observe its benefits and see it working.
- Michal Zoutkevich expects AI to create fundamental societal shifts similar to the internet era, though acknowledges this may or may not happen.