Former Wall Street analyst building market AI on why stock pickers won't go extinct

CNBC

a day ago

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.
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.
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 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.