Show notes

The Investment Intelligence Podcast: The pervasive power of Artificial Intelligence

Host: J.P. Vicente, Head of US Marketing & Client Engagement at Allianz Global Investors
Featured guest: Sebastian Thomas, lead portfolio manager for Artificial Intelligence at AllianzGI

Notes, quotes and references:

J.P. and Sebastian discuss the latest trends in Artificial Intelligence (AI), including how AI is helping companies to structure data, map consumer behavior, enhance cloud services, and further automate supply chains. Also: Sebastian talks about the growing role of AI in medicine, including the development of vaccines and treatments during the pandemic.

Some key thoughts and topics from this episode:

What are the key trends in Artificial Intelligence today?

“We believe that AI is one of the biggest innovation cycles that we've seen in our lifetimes. It's a new technology paradigm that allows new types of innovation, such as things like self-driving cars, or the ability to analyze genomic structures very rapidly. It's a data analytic platform that allows you to uncover patterns from data, and it opens up new areas of opportunity and innovation.”

How is AI changing the company/customer relationship and what does that mean for investing?

“As AI is being infused into a lot of products, consumers expect their products to be more intelligent and expect companies to have ongoing relationships with them … AI is setting the new standards by which consumers expect their products to work and companies to engage with them. But AI also has a role in terms of being able to monitor how this evolution is happening, and to be able to uncover patterns in terms of consumer behavior, that can allow you to get interesting investment insights.”

Which sectors are deploying AI best to capture generational shifts in consumer behavior?

“Pretty much every industry is redefining the customer experience, leveraging AI. Whether it's casual restaurants, where you go through a drive-through, where they enable more personalized service … whether it's in the healthcare field, where you're trying to get things to improve your fitness and wellness ... Every industry is figuring out how to leverage data to provide more personalized experiences to the consumer, in a way that is useful. In finance you're seeing that too, where consumers are given more planning tools, and ways to better manage their financial well-being. So, it's pretty much across every industry.”

What is the role of AI in aligning corporate interests with the values of their customers?

“There's a tremendous opportunity for companies to be able to deliver an application that yields real value to every one of their stakeholders: from the users to the employees and to the shareholders. That's the real opportunity of AI. When you look at something like social networking, there's an opportunity to bring people together … without having to create an environment that is unnecessarily hostile or causes division. There is a space there for companies to be able to add value without necessarily creating a system that is harmful.”

As more industries employ AI, are distinctions between equity sectors blurring?

“There's been a complete redefinition over the last several years. There's this constant redefinition that happens after … these companies have grown and as those that construct equity indices reimagine existing categorizations ... Given that it's evolving so quickly, it's really difficult to look at investing based on sector allocations, because the boundaries are burring so rapidly.”

The full episode has even more details on the topics above. Check it out.

Cultural recommendations:

J.P. recommends the surprise streaming hit of 2021, Squid Game, a South Korean drama about deeply indebted people playing old-fashioned children’s games to win a huge cash prize. The catch is that only one contestant can win while everyone else faces a grizzly fate. J.P. suggests you watch in the original Korean rather than dubbed in English.

Sebastian has been enjoying The Great British Baking Show, a show that USA Today describes as “wholesome and kind, an antidote to the hypercompetitive American reality series that focus on drama and scandal. Contestants help each other out as they vie to win a contest with no cash prize against the backdrop of a picturesque English country estate, complete with ducklings and bumblebees.”

Creativity and editing: Peter Lennox.
Production: Mark Egan.