Private Equity CEO Predicts AI Will Leave 60% of Finance Conference Attendees Jobless (entrepreneur.com) 73
Robert F. Smith, CEO of Vista Equity Partners, told attendees at the SuperReturn International 2025 conference in Berlin last week that 60% of the 5,500 finance professionals present will be "looking for work" next year due to AI disruption.
Smith predicted that while 40% of attendees will adopt AI agents -- programs that autonomously perform complex, multi-step tasks -- the remaining majority will need to find new employment as AI transforms the sector. "All of the jobs currently carried out by one billion knowledge workers today would change due to AI," Smith said, clarifying that while jobs won't disappear entirely, they will fundamentally transform.
Smith predicted that while 40% of attendees will adopt AI agents -- programs that autonomously perform complex, multi-step tasks -- the remaining majority will need to find new employment as AI transforms the sector. "All of the jobs currently carried out by one billion knowledge workers today would change due to AI," Smith said, clarifying that while jobs won't disappear entirely, they will fundamentally transform.
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So that the people who run the financial institutions can extract from you more efficiently?
Or is unemployment, in and of itself, pleasing to you?
Re: OK by me (Score:2)
Doubtful. Machines tend to reduce fees and let you keep more of your money. If a few finance guys who don't even understand the crap they are selling get fired and fees are reduced then it's a win.
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Sticky price increases is driven by 1 thing only, monetary supply.
The term inflation relates to inflating the monetary supply (money in circulation).
This is what causes permanent increase in pricing. Not corporate greed. (though there are isolated instances of this, its not the norm).
CPI is a manipulated statistical metric trying to show that prices are only increasing by 2% on average per year.
The natural state of an economy is deflationary. Technology reduces costs, which generaly should lead to more effi
Re: OK by me (Score:2)
though there are isolated instances of this, its not the norm
I stopped reading right there. You read anything about the inflation that occurred in the last couple years and it is indicated that most of it was not real inflation, and in fact 70% of it was from price increases beyond what was caused by companies responding to higher upstream costs.
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You might have read that, but it would be wrong and its source either being unknowlegable of monetary economics and/or lying about it.
The M2 monetary global liquidity has increased by 38% since February 2020 (see linked chart below). It went up massively during covid when pretty much all governements "printed" and distributed money to everyone to keep the economy they where destroying affloat.
That money eventually found itself into retail and other areas and rose inflation. Most if not all companies profit
Re: OK by me (Score:2)
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Grocerie store operating margins are one of the thinnest in the market. 3-5% per year.
The numbers seem massive because there is allot of products being sold, but as a business, its very thin.
End of year opearting margins are dependent on real estate investements that year, new land bought, store refresh, etc... Some years have massive negative growth and some higher. But on average its pretty steady.
Loblaws one of the largest grocery chains in Canada closed 2024 at 5%.
https://companiesmarketcap.com... [companiesmarketcap.com]
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If they tripled prices and their costs didnt go up, their operating margins would have tripled.
I'm not making excuses, you simply do not understand how monetary inflation functions or how business operates.
Cost increases happen across the supply chain.
Labor costs
Rent
Building maintenance
Fixed costs like electricity
This costs increase for the farmer, the factory that transforms the product, the distributor and finaly the grocer.
The grocer ALSO has labor cost increases, rent, maintenance, and other fixed costs
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Re: OK by me (Score:1)
What sky rocketing profits?
As stated their profit margins are barely increasing. Nominal dollar amounts go up but those dollars buy less due to all price increases.
Electricity has gone up, some grocers pat rent, those that own have repairs to do which coat more, they pay more in property taxes, insurance has skyrocketed and wages are most definitely up.
You seem to have a very narrow understanding of business, economics and costs of operations.
Do you have any other questions, maybe i can help you understand
Re: OK by me (Score:2)
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During that same time, most if not all construction project and investements where stopped.
If your avg profit margin is 3% but you spend half a billion one year, and don't the next year... what happens to your profit margin?
Exactly, it goes up.
I am not saying that is the only reason... its just quite easy and simple to follow the media narrative that Grocery Corporations bad... instead of understanding what is actually going on behind the scenes in business operations.
P.s. You do know pension funds and reta
Re: OK by me (Score:2)
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Its ok.
You clearly have an emotion you are trying to justify without wanting to understand reality.
Have a good day... we are going in circles here.
Re: OK by me (Score:2)
compressed ladder rungs (Score:2)
What's happening is that the bottom half of the rungs on the wage ladder are getting more and more compressed towards lower wages.
That will put more people in competition for entry level professional level wage jobs and push those wages further and further down until less college degrees are viable.
The first real crack in GDP will be a sustained lowering demand for and lowering, inflation adjusted, price for houses per square foot. Deflation is likely after that.
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I used to think that, but what that means is that when one sector becomes unemployed, you have a lot more people coming for your job. The front-end web people will get Azure certs and try to pry you out of your IT job. When layoffs happen, everyone gets hit by this, and it adds pressure. That quiet, cushy job in finance is now being assailed by people getting their CPAs. All fields feel it as more people are willing to come in and work for less.
Then, there are social issues. Charlie is unemployed, so t
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Not to worry, la Presidenta will just call out the National Guard of the States to perform the work that the unemployed can no longer do. Failing that, the Marines will come to the rescue. Failing that, he'll use Jimmy Joe Bob from Texas to do any science that needs getting done. And any disease outbreaks can be handled with Vitamin A and other potions dreamed up by Kennedy.
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I think they should have asked Zillow how that worked out for them first.
So we all know the guy is selling snake oil (Score:2, Interesting)
We already have massive amounts of technological and employment due to factories being automated. 70% of middle class jobs lost since 1980 got taken by automation and process improvement.
Our entire civilization is built on two basic concepts. First rapid population growth and second full employment.
Both of those pillars are collapsing and since we grew up with them we refuse to adapt or change.
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"and so you're going to talk about scary terminators and robocops or whatever."
Using AI to kill people is very real. The major tech companies at large fantasize openly about it.
If you are an oligarch (Score:2)
There are pretty well known processes developed by Stalin and Mao for preventing that but they're not perfect. And it requires constant attention and care as well as a great deal of skill and competence.
If you slip up then you get killed and replaced by a brand new oligarch. That of course doesn't do any good for the rank and file citizen but it d
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Indeed. because there is mountains of money in killing people. The human race is just crap like that.
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Re: So we all know the guy is selling snake oil (Score:1)
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I'm all in favor of space travel, but that's not going to solve the social problems on earth, and we don't yet have the ability to run a small self-sufficient stable society in an off-earth environment.
I do support space habitats, but I tend to think of that as a "next century" (or after the singularity) kind of thing.
What a large war does is kill of a large proportion of the most aggressive young males. It's one of the traditional ways the current crop of alpha-male primates keep control.
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How will those "colonies" (that are a fantasy, as we have no technology to make them feasible) will help exactly? You think they won't carry the "AI" there if it works as advertised by the people like the speaker?
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Sure, how many people do you think we can transport up there for how long (before their immune systems give out)? Ah, but you say, we'll have the ground support staff to send people into space; to do what, precisely? Increase the GDP? How will that happen? Magic?
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Our entire civilization is built on two basic concepts. First rapid population growth and second full employment.
There are more people employed today as a percentage of the population than ever. The world population continues to grow. Not sure how you came to that conclusion.
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Indeed. The thing is that we have enough productivity that most people could luve on their present level witt 10-20h of work per week. The reason most work more are inefficience, make-work, bureaucrats wanting as many subordinates as possible and the like. While "AI" cannot do real work, it can help indentifying all that wasted time. And without a reform that reduces worked hour per person, many people will be out of work, while other will continue to work much more than needed.
Full employment is a thing of
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Unlimited growth is a feature of capitalist economies, not "all civilizations". Most civilizations throughout history in fact had a lot to say about excessive growth, greed and accumulation.
As for full employment, capitalist societies are not based on full employment. They require a mass of unemployed people to discipline labor and keep wages low.
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I use that theory to protect my house from one of the trees falling on it. They won't fall because they have never fallen in the past.
But who will train the AI? (Score:2)
Certainly Mr. Smith would like for AI to replace millions of people in the finance sector. But if you eliminate 60% of finance workers and make the remaining 40% dependent on AI to do their jobs, it's going to really narrow down future training data. AI will be consuming its own output.
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The worst part about it is, by the time it's clear to everyone there is a problem, the people left will be too stupid to figure out what that problem actually is, let alone how to fix it. It will be clear that there's massive population decline and both the economy and natural environment are non-functioning, but most of them will barely be able to spell or do basic arithmetic without the help of the massive computer cluster that's eating everything.
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Hopefully, not using lead as a sweetener will help us not make all of the same mistakes, though we are already replicating some of them.
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AI trained on stolen data has no future. Generating that training data in other ways (but you _cannot_ use AI) is massively too much effort at this time. Hence the current AI hype will be over in a few years because this problem has no fix.
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Probably in 3-10 years there will be a handful of open, legally copyright free training sets anyone can use to train their own ~600b class model with whatever architecture is current state of the art. Researchers are already putting together 7b training sets like this. And LLMs can use tools like search now so they won't always need the most up to date news or info - they can use tools for that instead. Most of finance is analysis of documents, which LLMs have been excellent at for a while now.
Ummm..... (Score:2)
Robert F. Smith, CEO of Vista Equity Partners, told attendees [...] 60% of the 5,500 finance professionals present will be "looking for work" next year due to AI
...
Smith said, clarifying that while jobs won't disappear entirely, they will fundamentally transform.
"You're going to lose your job.... oh but not really."
Private Equity's New Target: Private Equity Itself (Score:2)
"60% of the 5,500 finance professionals present will be "looking for work" next year due to AI disruption."
Super optimistic or deeply cynical take from Robert F. Smith.
It sounds like he thinks that AI is either "primed and ready to make solid decisions and not hallucinate bankrupt Private Equity firms", or "that 60% of the people in Private Equity are so useless that hallucinating LLMs can replace them".
Probably more thinking of keeping more of the money "in-house" with the wealth class as it seems like Pri
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that sounds like a perfect job that LLM AIs can easily do. Switch to some system programmed with your companies formulas and let review everything, impartially, and then have that last 40% doing a final review and you can see where he is removing that 60%.
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Perhaps he thinks that in his field hallucinations don't matter. Perhaps he's right. I remember a famous elephant that beat the stock market. (I think it was also done with other animals.) Also see "A Random Walk through Wall Street"
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"SuperReturn?" (Score:2)
These must be those car warranty scammers I keep hearing about. If that's the case, I have no issue with them being out of job.
Why would anyone care what this guy... (Score:3)
And this isn't my opinion. This is the DOJ's opinion. This is Robert F. Smith's own opinion. He signed a non-prosecution agreement admitting to all of this...and then Brockman's lawyer died of "suicide" and Brockman died from dementia.
So the entire world found out that Robert F Smith wasn't an expert investor, he was a fraudster AND a snitch.
And here it is, the non-prosecution agreement signed by Robert F Smith. This proves he isn't loyal to his clients and that he isn't honest about his business: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr... [justice.gov]
what do they do (Score:2)
I was curious about what "finance professionals" do, maybe there is more variety than I realized, but no.
An investment firm I do business with has a human agent assigned to me and he offered to perform a detailed analysis, sounded useful. The first step was data gathering. I filled out a lengthy form listing all my assets and liabilities, my risk level, my goals hopes and dreams, etc. Then we had a video meeting to discuss it. It was clear that he had plugged the form data into a software utility that gener
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The guy praising AI is a confessed tax cheat and government informant. This article is about a liar promoting a product no one wants. It's pathetic. entrepreneur.com is a marketing platform, not a journalistic endeavor.
Slashdot needs to change it's tagline from "News for Nerds" to something like "Ads for Sads".
Cocaine makes this story better (Score:3, Funny)
Private Equity CEO Predicts cocaine Will Leave 60% of Finance Conference Attendees Jobless
Robert F. Smith, CEO of Vista Equity Partners, told attendees at the SuperReturn International 2025 conference in Berlin last week that 60% of the 5,500 finance professionals present will be "looking for work" next year due to cocaine disruption.
Smith predicted that while 40% of attendees will adopt cocaine agents -- programs that autonomously perform complex, multi-step tasks -- the remaining majority will need to find new employment as cocaine transforms the sector. "All of the jobs currently carried out by one billion knowledge workers today would change due to cocaine," Smith said, clarifying that while jobs won't disappear entirely, they will fundamentally transform.
Can't they use Domestos instead (Score:2)
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But not me (Score:2)
Finance won't be leaving the people who put the infrastructure together jobless any time soon. Too bad I refuse to work for the finance industry any more. Something about being chained to a desk while being forced to perform demeaning tricks for quarterly bonuses. They can put their 300k jobs where the sun don't shine.
Less swindlers, scammers and gamblers (Score:1)
Less 10% taker w4nk3rs all round. Sounds good. Bring it on.
Hallucination (Score:1)
Hallucination from AI can boost stock prices more than even President Trump. We are on the right track here. AI that ignores facts, invents evidence, and gives the requested results will make any realists, sceptics, truth sayers etc in finance a thing of the past. What could possible go wrong.
And we know everybody in big money are very honest, and would never do anything for money, or to cover up mistakes.
*** sarcasm off ***
AI is great with words, can help with code. But when it comes to hard facts, then A
What is their net impact on the economy? (Score:1)
Adding lawyers reduces GDP according to some studies, while engineers increase GDP. Has anyone done any research on the net impact of adding more financiers?
Money itself will lose its ... (Score:2)
... significance if all goes well. That's a good thing, by and large. It's called post-scarcity-economy and in a perfect world it's capitalisms end game.
but even (Score:2)
But even without AI, they should be jobless.
Welcome to Elysium! Your favela hovel is ready. (Score:2)
This is what PE CEOs do (Score:2)
They convince investors that they will be able to slash jobs and increase profits at the same time. This is exactly the same, but with the added phrase "using AI." Its the same old swindle.