Former Wall Street analyst building market AI on why stock pickers won’t go extinct
Wall Street isn’t immune from the plot line that has generative AI resulting in wholesale knowledge worker replacement. A new tool from AlphaSense, called Deep Research, won’t provide any comfort.
The generative AI agent functions like a team of analysts operating at what AlphaSense calls “superhuman speed,” generating research and market insights, and building investment-grade briefings.
But Jack Kokko, AlphaSense CEO and a former Morgan Stanley analyst and Wharton School MBA, isn’t worried about the job outlook for Wall Street professionals.
“It’s a popular narrative,” Kokko told CNBC of the job replacement fears during an interview on “The Exchange” on Tuesday after AlphaSense ranked No. 8 on the 2025 CNBC Disruptor 50 list. “But I would not be so sure,” he said.
What Deep Research does is tap into the AlphaSense universe of more than 500 million business and financial documents, which includes filings, press releases, content about public and private companies, and expert insights based on call transcripts. Last year, the company spent nearly $1 billion to buy Tegus and its library of a quarter-million business-focused interviews.
“There are a hundred on a single company, and no human can read it all, but Deep Research will read it all and ask questions,” Kokko said.
It will answer questions too, ones that Wall Street analysts are often paid to field, within minutes.
The company, which dates back to 2011 and has had Goldman Sachs Growth Asset Management as an investor since its origin, already offers rapid summaries of equity research and real-time customizable reports. And it already has a tool called Generative Search designed to think like an analyst, ask natural language questions and receive precise insights sourced from AlphaSense’s content, which covers 37 languages.
Any of of its enterprise intelligence customers in equities research, corporate development and finance, on or off Wall Street, will be able to plug their internal document libraries into Deep Research, which will then be able to take both pro and con positions, and offer internal and external perspectives, in a report generated in record time.
“It would have taken a human analyst days or weeks,” Kokko said. “I was an analyst,” he added.
Timothy A. Clary | Afp | Getty Images
The company says it counts majority of the S&P 100 as clients. That client base grew by about 25% in 2024, to more than 5,000, including Amazon, Nvidia, Microsoft, Pfizer and JPMorgan.
For companies making investments that run into the millions or billions of dollars, being able to make these decisions on the back of all of this information is a revelation, Kokko said, citing the experience of a private equity firm that told AlphaSense that Deep Research did the same or even better on a report the AI ran than its in-house analysts could do in weeks.
There are plenty of reasons to believe that this is all bad news for knowledge professionals like finance bros. And more CEOs are starting to talk that way, from Shopify’s CEO who recently said no job hire requisitions will be approved unless a manager can prove that the job can’t be done by AI, to fellow Disruptor Anthropic‘s CEO Dario Amodei, who recently said AI would wipe out up to half of entry-level office jobs and whose latest Claude model can work 7 hours straight without a break or burnout.
Everyone is getting an AI assistant today — on Tuesday, it was Starbucks’ baristas.
Wall Street’s long embrace of AI has only accelerated in the wake of OpenAI’s arrival in 2022. Last August, JPMorgan Chase rolled out a generative artificial intelligence assistant to employees that can help them with tasks like writing emails and reports, while Morgan Stanley has already released a pair of OpenAI-powered tools for its financial advisors. In January, Goldman Sachs gave its bankers, traders and asset managers access to a generative AI assistant, the first stage in the evolution of a program that will eventually take on the traits of a seasoned Goldman employee, Goldman Sachs Chief Information Officer Marco Argenti told CNBC.
But Kokko says the Wall Street bonus — for now, and as he sees it, into the future — is safe. He is still of the belief that the latest AI will enhance the jobs of Wall Street analysts rather than threaten them. “What it does is make human analysts and business people so much more productive,” he said. “That person will be operating with a higher ROI [return on investment] and companies don’t cut high ROI people,” he added.
What AI job doomsday soothsayers are dismissing too easily today is “the top line expansion that comes from being able to do things in a much more agile way,” Kokko said.
“It’s 10x prior productivity when it is you and the machine,” he added.
Sign up for our weekly, original newsletter that goes beyond the annual Disruptor 50 list, offering a closer look at list-making companies and their innovative founders.
The Datadog stand is being displayed on day one of the AWS Summit Seoul 2024 at the COEX Convention and Exhibition Center in Seoul, South Korea, on May 16, 2024.
Chris Jung | Nurphoto | Getty Images
Datadog shares were up 10% in extended trading on Wednesday after S&P Global said the monitoring software provider will replace Juniper Networks in the S&P 500 U.S. stock index.
S&P Global is making the change effective before the beginning of trading on July 9, according to a statement.
Computer server maker Hewlett Packard Enterprise, also a constituent of the index, said earlier on Wednesday that it had completed its acquisition of Juniper, which makes data center networking hardware. HPE disclosed in a filing that it paid $13.4 billion to Juniper shareholders.
Over the weekend, the two companies reached a settlement with the U.S. Justice Department, which had sued in opposition to the deal. As part of the settlement, HPE agreed to divest its global Instant On campus and branch business.
While tech already makes up an outsized portion of the S&P 500, the index has has been continuously lifting its exposure as the industry expands into more areas of society.
DoorDash was the latest tech company to join during the last rebalancing in March. Cloud software vendor Workday was added in December, and that was preceded earlier in 2024 with the additions of Palantir, Dell, CrowdStrike, GoDaddy and Super Micro Computer.
Stocks often rally when they’re added to a major index, as fund managers need to rebalance their portfolios to reflect the changes.
New York-based Datadog went public in 2019. The company generated $24.6 million in net income on $761.6 million in revenue in the first quarter of 2025, according to a statement. Competitors include Cisco, which bought Splunk last year, as well as Elastic and cloud infrastructure providers such as Amazon and Microsoft.
Datadog has underperformed the broader tech sector so far this year. The stock was down 5.5% as of Wednesday’s close, while the Nasdaq was up 5.6%. Still, with a market cap of $46.6 billion, Datadog’s valuation is significantly higher than the median for that index.
— CNBC’s Ari Levy contributed to this report.
CNBC: Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel on the cloud computing outlook
A representation of cryptocurrency Ethereum is placed on a PC motherboard in this illustration taken on June 16, 2023.
Dado Ruvic | Reuters
Stocks tied to the price of ether, better known as ETH, were higher on Wednesday, reflecting renewed enthusiasm for the crypto asset amid a surge of interest in stablecoins and tokenization.
BitMine Immersion Technologies, a bitcoin miner that announced plans this week to make ETH its primary treasury reserve asset, jumped about 20%. It’s gained more than 1,000% since the announcement. Betting platform SharpLink Gaming, which has also initiated an ETH treasury strategy, added more than 11%. Bit Digital, which last week exited bitcoin mining to focus on its ETH treasury and staking plans, jumped more than 6%.
“We’re finally at the point where real use cases are emerging, and stablecoins have been the first version of that at scale but they’re going to open the door to a much bigger story around tokenizing other assets and using digital assets in new ways,” Devin Ryan, head of financial technology research at Citizens.
On Tuesday, as bitcoin ETFs snapped a 15-day streak of inflows, ether ETFs saw $40 million in inflows led by BlackRock’s iShares Ethereum Trust. ETH ETFs came back to life in June after much concern that they were becoming zombie funds.
The price of the coin itself was last higher by 5%, according to Coin Metrics, though it’s still down 24% this year.
Ethereum has been struggling with an identity crisis fueled by uncertainty about the network’s value proposition, weaker revenue since its last big technical upgrade and increasing competition from Solana. Market volatility, driven by geopolitical uncertainty this year, has not helped.
The Ethereum network’s smart contracts capability makes it a prominent platform for the tokenization of traditional assets, which includes U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoins. Fundstrat’s Tom Lee this week called Ethereum “the backbone and architecture” of stablecoins. Both Tether (USDT) and Circle‘s USD Coin (USDC) are issued on the network.
BlackRock’s tokenized money market fund (known as BUIDL, which stands for USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund) also launched on Ethereum last year before expanding to other blockchain networks.
Tokenization is the process of issuing digital representations on a blockchain network of publicly traded securities, real world assets or any other form of value. Holders of tokenized assets don’t have outright ownership of the assets themselves.
The latest wave of interest in ETH-related assets follows an announcement by Robinhood this week that it will enable trading of tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs across Europe, after a groundswell of interest in stablecoins throughout June following Circle’s IPO and the Senate passage of its proposed stablecoin bill, the GENIUS Act.
Ether, which turns 10 years old at the end of July, is sitting about 75% off its all-time high.
-
Sports3 years ago‘Storybook stuff’: Inside the night Bryce Harper sent the Phillies to the World Series
-
Sports1 year agoStory injured on diving stop, exits Red Sox game
-
Sports2 years agoGame 1 of WS least-watched in recorded history
-
Sports2 years agoMLB Rank 2023: Ranking baseball’s top 100 players
-
Sports4 years ago
Team Europe easily wins 4th straight Laver Cup
-
Environment2 years agoJapan and South Korea have a lot at stake in a free and open South China Sea
-
Sports2 years agoButton battles heat exhaustion in NASCAR debut
-
Environment2 years agoGame-changing Lectric XPedition launched as affordable electric cargo bike