Young Professionals over AI: Chong Peng (Van Lanschot Kempen)
Young Professionals over AI: Chong Peng (Van Lanschot Kempen)
By Chong Peng, Portfolio Manager Equities, Van Lanschot Kempen
Where does (generative) AI offer the greatest opportunities for institutional investors?
‘I would be lying if I said that I did not ask ChatGPT the same question before I wrote my answer. When my company started trialling Copilot last year, people started dreaming that we would be able to free our time from boring grunt work and just focus on finding alpha. AI would update our Excel models, write monthly portfolio reports, and most importantly, make us delicious coffee. Very soon we realized that this would not happen as fast as we hoped.
Despite the constant mixed feeling of disappointment and hope, I see AI as more of a friend than an enemy. Copilot is already helping me on a daily basis to summarize emails I got from newspapers and brokers. I am also hopeful for things like semantic search to enable me to do better fundamental analysis.
Now, what about investment opportunities? We saw the market hype on AI-related companies in 2023, but don’t forget that industrials and consumers are the real applications to come! Businesses we cannot possibly imagine today, will arise. Massive disruption will happen during this transition, much like the turmoil after the invention of steam power, electricity, and the internet, which brings both winners and losers. Think of translators, programmers, artists … how we are going to educate our children or build our houses will be completely different. When we think of opportunities, never forget the other side of that coin is risk. That also applies to AI.’
Businesses we cannot possibly imagine today, will arise.