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.
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Alexandr Wang, CEO of ScaleAI speaks on CNBC’s Squawk Box outside the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Jan. 23, 2025.
Gerry Miller | CNBC
Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang told employees in a memo on Thursday that he’s leaving for Meta, confirming reports from earlier in the week about his departure and a large investment from the social networking company.
Meta is pumping $14.3 billion into Scale AI as part of the deal, and will have a 49% stake in the artificial intelligence startup, but will not have any voting power, a Scale AI spokesperson said.
“As you’ve probably gathered from recent news, opportunities of this magnitude often come at a cost,” Wang wrote in the memo that he shared on X. “In this instance, that cost is my departure. It has been the absolute greatest pleasure of my life to serve as your CEO.”
Scale AI is promoting Jason Droege, the chief strategy officer, to the CEO role. Droege was previously a venture partner at Benchmark and an Uber vice president.
A small number of Scale AI employees will also join Meta as part of the agreement, Wang wrote.
A Meta spokesperson confirmed that the company has finalized its “strategic partnership and investment in Scale AI.
“As part of this, we will deepen the work we do together producing data for AI models and Alexandr Wang will join Meta to work on our superintelligence efforts,” the spokesperson said. “We will share more about this effort and the great people joining this team in the coming weeks.”
Meta’s big bet on Wang fits into CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s plans to bolster his company’s AI efforts amid fierce competition from OpenAI and Google-parent Alphabet. Zuckerberg has made AI his company’s top priority for 2025, but has grown increasingly frustrated with his team, particularly as Meta’s latest version of its flagship Llama AI models received a tepid response from developers, CNBC reported earlier this week.
Although Zuckerberg has traditionally placed long-standing employees into high-ranking position, he decided that the outsider Wang would be better suited to oversee AI initiatives deemed crucial for the company.
Scale AI counts a number of Meta rivals as customers, including Google, Microsoft and OpenAI. Meta is one of Scale AI’s biggest clients.
The Scale AI spokesperson said that Meta’s investment and hiring of Wang will not impact the startup’s customers, and that Meta will not be privy to any of its business information or data.
Larry Ellison, Oracle’s co-founder, chief technology officer and chairman, at right, and U.S. President Donald Trump share a laugh as Ellison uses a stool to stand on as he speaks during a news conference in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington on Jan. 21, 2025. Trump announced an investment in artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure and took questions on a range of topics including his presidential pardons of Jan. 6 defendants, the war in Ukraine, cryptocurrencies and other topics.
Andrew Harnik | Getty Images News | Getty Images
Oracle shares soared 13% on Thursday to a record close, after the database software vendor issued robust earnings and a strong forecast, fueled by growth in cloud.
Revenue climbed 11% year over year during the fiscal fourth quarter to $15.9 billion, topping the $15.59 billion average estimate, according to LSEG. Adjusted earnings per share of $1.70 exceeded the average analyst estimate of $1.64.
“All told, ORCL has entered an entirely new wave of enterprise popularity that it has not seen since the Internet era in the late 90s,” Piper Sandler analysts wrote in a note to clients. The firm was one of several to lift its price target on the stock, raising its prediction to $190 from $130.
Oracle has been making headway in the cloud infrastructure market to challenge Amazon, Google and Microsoft. It’s still small by comparison, with $3 billion in cloud revenue during the May quarter, compared with over $12 billion for Google, which counts productivity software subscriptions and cloud infrastructure sales when reporting cloud metrics. But Oracle’s business is growing faster.
Future expansion can also come from sales of Oracle’s database on clouds other than its own.
“The growth rate in multi-cloud is astonishing,” Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison said on Wednesday’s conference call with analysts. “In other words, our database is now moving very rapidly to the cloud, I think because – a few reasons, because the database has now all these AI capabilities, but also, quite frankly, now people can get it in whatever cloud they want.”
Remaining performance obligations, a measurement of money that’s expected to be recognized as revenue in the future, sat at $138 billion, up 41% from a year earlier. Oracle CEO Safra Catz said RPO will likely more than double in the 2026 fiscal year, which ends in May 2026. Revenue for the new fiscal year should come in above $67 billion, she said. That’s higher than LSEG’s $65.18 billion consensus.
Gains from OpenAI’s Stargate artificial intelligence data center project, targeting $500 billion in investments over four years, are not yet included in forecasts.
“If Stargate turns out to be, everything is advertised, then we’ve understated our RPO growth,” Ellison said.
For fiscal 2029, revenue should be above the $104 billion target the company set in September, Catz said.
Still, the company faces the challenge of meeting client demand in cloud.
“Demand continues to dramatically outstrip supply,” Catz said, though she added that the company isn’t having trouble sourcing Nvidia graphics processing units.
Analysts at RBC, who recommend holding the stock, raised their price target to $195 to $145. But they noted that, “with the backdrop of continued capacity constraints, we struggle to see a path to meaningful acceleration in the near term.”
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