Our journey to 10X AI

As an industry we love nothing more than the ‘next big thing’. Whether we’re on the Sell side or Buy side, and despite our experiences watching fads come and go, we lean in to the ‘shiny new thing’ and right now, that thing is AI. We lean in because we also know that sometimes, these shiny new things change the world forever, and create enormous value in the process.

This is our belief about AI.

But our belief in the value of AI doesn’t come from the hype, and it didn’t begin yesterday. Our journey began back in 2021 with the Australian Federal Government’s Business Research and Innovation Initiative (BRII). 

While Governments are often lambasted for short-term opportunistic investments over those required for long-term prosperity, the BRII program is an excellent example of the opposite. The program saw us work closely with ASIC to help them better understand AI and its capacity to assist them ‘...identify and assess poor market disclosure by listed companies’ specifically, and with other similar challenges in general.

The BRII program asked us to apply AI to the task of assessing ASX listed company disclosures for compliance with the Corporations Act, listing rules and guidance notes, as well as to the problem of detecting when information had leaked into the market, ahead of being reported to the exchange.

It was a fascinating project which afforded us first-hand exposure to the daily challenge faced by the Regulator in its attempts to stare down the ever-increasing torrents of information, and just as importantly, the capabilities of AI to address such challenges.

And at some point during this process, the light globe went on…

I was a stockbroker in the pre-Internet era, where information was in short-supply and our daily challenge was the search for ‘more and better’ (to hand off to our clients in exchange for an order). I was a fund manager as the Internet arrived and we saw volumes of information start rising (as can be seen in the chart below), and we began to experience for the first time, that state of helplessness we know only too well today i.e. Where to start? What can I trust? Is there something else more important I should be spending my time on?

And with no feasible way of addressing these issues, we spent little time trying to do so, rather relying on our (finely tuned!) ‘skills and experience’, to avoid some sources of information, while focusing on others (the genuinely miniscule component of the global information pool we happened to be aware of).

And then… AI.

Unlimited in its ability to address enormous volumes of information generated each day on a timely basis, continuously, over long periods of time, with consistent quality and in multiple instances simultaneously, AI is the answer to our information overloaded existence. And while AI does have very real limitations, in combination with our own uniquely human attributes, we see human+AI output rising to previously inconceivable levels.

Of course there will be challenges along the way, but we’re also of the belief that we’ve only just begun to understand the benefits thoughtful deployment of the technology will bring. While the focus is often on the efficiency gains AI can deliver, for us it’s the ability to generate insights simply not possible today, that holds the greatest promise for an AI-enhanced future.

While we may already be several years into our journey, we’re incredibly excited about the road ahead. We hope we can help you with your own journey, as we bring this game-changing technology safely and effectively into the investment industry.