Artificial Intelligence (AI): A Paradigm Shift For Investors

April 27, 2023

Vice President & Portfolio Manager Vishal Patel shares his thoughts on the importance of Artificial Intelligence (AI), how it will impact various industries from an investment standpoint, and how this technology will impact how we work and play.

PARTICIPANTS

Mark Brisley
Managing Director and Head of Dynamic Funds

Vishal Patel
Vice President & Portfolio Manager

 

Mark Brisley: You're listening to On the Money with Dynamic Funds, the podcast series that delivers access, insights, and perspective from some of the industry's most respected active managers and thought leaders. From market commentaries and economic analysis to personal finance, investing, and beyond, on the Money covers it all, because when it comes to your money, we're on it. Welcome to another edition of On the Money. I'm your host, Mark Brisley.

A constant thrill at our history is that we humans continually look for ways to make our lives, and specifically our work more efficient. There have been so many transformational and disruptive developments that have changed our lives forever with respect to new technology development, all with the intent to make our lives better and more productive.

If we go old school and talk about disruptors like the steam engine or flight and the telephone, that's one way to think about it, but let's be more relevant here, talk about modern disruptors of just the past 50 years that have changed our lives. Personal computers, cell phones, the internet, social media, and now alongside cloud computing, machine learning, and robotics is what many believe to be the catalyst for the beginning of a fourth industrial revolution, artificial intelligence.

AI is definitely interesting, definitely transformative, and it's definitely disruptive, but for many, it's also scary. As with any new technology or development that will have broad-based application globally and on just about every facet of our life, there's always the question of how to become involved in a sustainable trend in development of new technology from an investing perspective. If we think of modern-day mega tech giants like Apple, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, just to name a few, all of these were companies on the cutting edge of new technology.

By extension, it became foundational for investors to capitalize on the growth and emergence of these new technologies. Not surprisingly, these same companies are on the front lines of massive investment into AI development within their own infrastructure. This theme isn't just limited to the tech space, every sector in the investing universe will be impacted at some point by artificial intelligence, including wealth management, investment firms, and banking.

The latest development within the AI space causing the biggest stir is generative AI. This is an emerging class of technologies that produce content, including text, graphics, and even videos. Alongside its more mature predecessors, generative AI has the incredible power to automate the creation of content. This is a market that continues to advance rapidly. Leaders across industries consistently report how important this technology is to their future.

In fact, in a recent report by Deloitte on the state of AI in the enterprise, 94% of business leaders in that survey reported that AI is critical to their success over the next five years. To unpack more on why it's important to know about it from an investment lens, I'm joined by portfolio manager Vishal Patel. Vishal is a passionate investor who runs over 5 billion in assets for us here at Dynamic Funds, takes a keen interest in this rapidly emerging area of technology to think about how it will be adopted, how it'll impact the way we work and play, and perhaps most importantly, what it means for investments and portfolios. Vishal, great to have you with us.

Vishal Patel: Thanks for having me, Mark.

Mark: What's a simple way for our listeners to think about AI and where we are in the overall development here?

Vishal: One of the simplest ways to think about AI, to think about the impact that this can have on people, our lives, the way we work, the way we think, the way we communicate is this idea of Netflix. Netflix knows what are the movies that you've watched. A basic AI, algorithm-based would actually be a recommender system. A recommender system essentially knows every single movie that you've watched. Then it asks you to rate it. Based on that, it's able to recommend what are some additional programs you might like, what are some additional genres that you would like. That's a very basic way to think about AI. That's step one.

Where we've gone to now, version 2.0, 3.0. What's causing a lot of hype right now is what you just talked about from a generative AI perspective. A simple way to think about generative AI, there was a picture of the Pope recently wearing a puffer jacket. That's something that generative AI can do, is take a picture and put a puffer jacket. I'm 90% sure that wasn't a real picture. I don't think the Pope was wearing a white puffer jacket, but it looked pretty real to me.

Mark: It's interesting, doing the research for this podcast and just a lot of the reading that I came across, AI in theory, it's not really new. If you think about the early rudimentary stages, like chat bots, they were around in the '60s. There was a movie done about it in 2001, A Space Odyssey with HAL. How do we think about AI adoption now? We've come a long way and it's super advanced.

Vishal: It's going to get even more advanced. I would say it's like anything else. If you step back earlier, you mentioned different kinds of revolution, whether it was the PC revolution, internet, mobile, the things that we're able to allow that was, let's just take network and network bandwidth. I remember when telephones were the size of a brick, but then we went from that to actually having smartphones. If you remember, we had blackberries, and blackberries had keyboards, and nobody thought that you can actually have a device without a keyboard.

As these devices got faster and as networks got faster, whether you get 2G, 3G, 5G, the ability to have more bandwidth allowed for more applications, allowed for more data, allowed for video, and there was this huge transition from PC to mobile. What we've seen with video has been tremendous. Similar when you think about AI and AI adoption, correct, it's been around for a long period of time. I just mentioned a basic recommender system.

I believe ChatGPT is what's creating a lot of hype in this notion of generative AI, is creating hype and it's becoming more useful to essentially society and population. When you look at historically to get a hundred million users, it's taken companies five years, six years, X number of months. ChatGPT was able to get to a hundred million in two months and a lot of people are using it. There's definitely been more adoption. Essentially, if you think data is the new oil, you have more and more data and you have faster and faster computers and you have faster and faster processing. This is what's allowing for more and more AI. It's allowing for more and more AI adoption.

Now, whether the curve is going to be fast or whether it's going to be slow, it's really going to depend on industry by industry. Then I want to use another story. We used to go to Shoppers Drug Mart and this notion of an automated checkout has been there for at least 10, 15 years. In Canada, I believe, there was at least one or two public companies that we could have bought, whether it's Costco or anyone else, to have these self-checkouts. Self-checkout didn't really take off until more recently. When you walk into a Shoppers or Costco, you see more and more self-checkouts. A, labor costs are a little bit higher now, but B, the customer is getting more and more comfortable using some of these systems.

The same thing when you think about AI and AI adoption. One of the things I encourage everyone to do is to play with the tools. Go and open up an account, it's free. You don't have to get the $20 premium account, and there's going to be more and more services. This is just version 1.0. Just imagine where we're going to be 5 years from now, 10 years from now, 15 years from now.

Like anything else, this technology's going to evolve, but I do think it's going to get better, it's going to get smarter. As you get more data, as you get more speed, that's going to help solve the world's most complex problems. That's what the CEO of Nvidia, Jensen, continues to say, is tools are going to help solve our most complex problems, and he's very excited about the possibilities of what AI can do, specifically in the healthcare space.

Mark: Despite what we just saw happen with the banking crisis, we are seeing venture capital flowing to AI startups. We're seeing every major corporation put out a paper on how they're thinking about things, but who's really leading in this space? I mentioned some big tech names at the beginning, but it's way bigger than that.

Vishal: That's a great question. Just think about open AI. Was open AI supposed to be open and open-sourced and for the public or is this actually a private enterprise? Does Microsoft actually own a big equity stake? Is Microsoft the leader? If we want to unpackage this a little bit, I would first start by saying I don't think anyone actually owns the space. I would say that there's leaders in this space, but like the internet, I don't think anyone actually owns the internet. I would say I don't think anyone actually owns AI, at least if you think about it from a holistic investment lens.

What I would say is that there are current leaders, and I would say the current leaders have been thinking about this and investing in the space for years. If you listen to a Microsoft call or an Nvidia call or a Google call, for the past five, six, seven, eight years, each and every single one of them on their quarterly conference calls has mentioned AI, AI spend, AI adoption, all the buzzwords we've been using today.

I would say that these companies have a lot of money. They're big, they're spending. They have the infrastructure. Earlier I mentioned what's going to allow for more and more adoption. Why Microsoft? Microsoft has Azure. They're a huge player in the cloud. There's a lot of data in the cloud. Earlier I mentioned you need data, you need cloud, but you also need compute power in the cloud. That's a company like Nvidia, which makes semiconductors and graphics processing units specifically. That's this idea of accelerated computing.

Currently the big leaders I would say are Nvidia, and that's from a chips and hardware perspective. I would say Microsoft and the potential investment idea that they have with OpenAI, but also, what's going to happen with data center and cloud, if you have more and more companies that are interested, you're going to have more data in the cloud, you're going to have more analytics, you're going to have more tools and you're definitely going to have them lead. Even Bing, Bing was never really a great search engine, but if Microsoft is leading in AI, are they going to take some market share from Google?

Google stock recently has been significantly impaired by-- They launched their version, and it wasn't as good. Look, I think the management team there is excited, and they have some interesting white papers in the space. Look, you're right, the big companies right now they got big budgets and they're leading, and when you look at our portfolios, actually, we own a lot of these big tech companies, and we like them going forward. I would say what every single tech executive worries about is what you were just talking about, this ecosystem.

If you actually go to Silicon Valley, there's parks and you actually have AI meetups, and at these AI meetups, you have some VC people there and the VC guy will write you a check and then you'll create something. Similar to Internet, Amazon was essentially created because of the Internet and the Internet revolution. There's a whole bunch of companies that were created, so this notion of companies that are going to be destroyed and companies that are going to be created, I do think capitalism works and you're going to see new and new businesses created using AI in specific use cases.

I would say nobody owns this space, first of all, there are companies leading, the big ones, but if you're willing to look forward, and this business has always been about looking forward, what companies worry about is, are there two people in a garage that come up with something really, really cool and really, really disruptive? For us, currently, how we're thinking about it has really been the mega cap stocks.

Mark: It doesn't seem like there's going to be a sector from an investible sector standpoint that isn't going to be affected by AI. I'm curious to hear your thoughts on, we've talked about tech, but with tech and where it's going to be deployed, what are some of the other areas that we really think in the immediate term that we're going to see AI emerge or at least have a lot of attention if not capital deployed towards it?

Vishal: Sectors is crucial. The way we think about investing is based on 11 sectors. We have analysts on the team that do research on the different sectors. This is actually the question I've asked the research team to spend a lot of time thinking about. It's the question we should be asking the management teams in the companies that we invest in from a sector perspective. Whether it's our financial services analyst, or our industrial analyst, or our consumer staples analyst and discretionary.

Let's take a sector-by-sector approach here. I do think that there's sectors, actually, that are not going to be as impacted, and that actually makes them quite valuable from a durability because they're not going to be disrupted. Let's use that and let's start with that a little bit first. Take basic materials. I'm not sure copper or gold are really going to be impacted by AI, and the reason I say that is I'm not sure in the physical world, so this idea of physical world versus digital world. In the physical world, physical commodities I think are actually going to be okay and I'm not sure they're going to be impacted that much.

Then this idea of oil, energy and the energy sector. I'm not sure AI is necessarily going to disrupt the energy sector. Are you going to be able to use AI to find more discoveries and discover more oil? Maybe.

Mark: Maybe processes or data that determines extraction methodology, that type of thing.

Vishal: Yes, that's possible. I would put these extractive industries probably at the lower end. In the middle of what we have and going back to this idea of the physical world versus the digital world, you're wearing a really nice suit today. Things in the physical world I don't think are going to be as impacted. From an investment lens, whether it's something like paint or something like shoes or something like clothing-- I think the metaverse, there was a lot of hype in terms of, is there going to be a Nike shoe or a Hermes bag in the metaverse?

When I think about AI, I'm not sure from a consumer staples, there's going to be no AI for eating or something of that sort. Consumer staples, not so much, consumer discretionary, not so much, energy materials-- Where I do think you're going to have significant disruption, we just talked about technology, but I would say the second area where there's going to be significant disruption is actually our business, financial services. The reason why financial services from a sector-by-sector perspective is because the financial services sector is more digital.

The pendulum or the mental model you should use is the physical world versus the digital world. If we're thinking about banking, core banking has gone more and more digital. If you speak to any bank, they're proud of telling you how many people are using mobile and how you need less branches. Is that potentially a risk if something like banking uses more and more digital tools or payments? I think financial services and how you process financial services and whether it's insurance, PNC insurance, auto claims, this notion of digital, I think financial services is an area definitely of opportunity, but also of risks.

I would recommend anyone listen or read Jamie Dimon and his annual report. He's got a whole paragraph dedicated to AI and its impact on a large financial institution like his, the number of data scientists they have, the number of machine engineering, the number of processes that they've been thinking about, the number of use cases, fraud, data, data protection. The ethical use of AI as a financial services company is also something that he mentions. Financial services is definitely something we need to think about longer term.

Then let's talk about industrials. Industrials is a very interesting one. Think about Caterpillar or Deere or the railroads, can they be more efficient? We haven't hit on autonomous and autonomous driving, but there are AI-based, and so can you actually push a button and have a tractor feel that's going to be cut for you and things of that sort? Industrials is also something-- When we think about efficiency, I do like thinking about AI from a neutral positive perspective and from an efficiency perspective.

Mark: Oh, I guess, not a reflection of the AI technology, but that could be another business issue. Okay, let's talk about the elephant in the room, to overuse the cliche, but there's some fear around the technology. Actually, one of the things I kept running into as well was AI and robotics seem to be inextricably linked. Part of the fear you're reading about is this idea of artificially intelligent robots taking over the world and taking my job and changing all these things. First of all, why is the fear out there? Is it valid? This technology is meant to help not cause panic, but it seems to be having a rather different impact on different people.

Vishal: Yes, no, this is front and center. It's front and center with governments, it's front and center with business leaders. Look, with any big megatrend, you've mentioned the industrial revolution, a lot of people were worried about their jobs, but look, we haven't even talked about military and military use cases. I mentioned industrials, military fits into that industrial complex, but there's definitely a lot of fear and there's fear with any new technology and the adoption of any new technology. This is why certain people think development should be slowed down, and are we going a little bit too fast, and are you going to actually break things?

It's definitely something where I think governments actually need to come together. You don't want to have mass panic. [chuckles] Government regulation I think is going to be important. I think government policy is going to be important. I do think that a lot of business leaders and government leaders are thinking about this. Earlier we just talked about the potential for more and more adoption, but as we get more and more adoption, should you actually have more and more regulation and should we be thinking this through?

Imagine all the harm that can be caused if you can actually create not just a fake picture, but a fake video. Imagine you have a business leader or a politician and it's all actually fake. These are actually things that we need to be worried about. Or even take homework, for example. If students are using this to do their homework, how do you actually have some accountability? Yes, there's definitely a lot of fear out there, but for me, the way I really think about it is man plus machine, one plus one is equal to three.

Think about this whole notion of Iron Man, the ability to fly and you have Jarvis, and I now understand that's a movie, but that's maybe the direction that we can think about in terms of going, but I would be quite positive about what's going to happen because over time, earlier when you mentioned different revolutions, everyone used to be in farming. The jobs eventually will change. It's interesting because a lot of people thought you should actually go in and become a computer programmer, but if you could use AI tools to do computer programming for you, do you actually need that many computer programmers?

I would say overall, I think this is going to make people more efficient. I think it's going to make jobs more efficient. Over time, technology does lead to all of us having better lives. I understand that there's a lot of fear and there's rightful reasons to be fearful, but I would also say that there's a lot of good and a lot of things to be optimistic about. We haven't touched on healthcare as a sector yet, but when you think about healthcare and what this can do for healthcare, improving patients, improving patient lives and improving the livelihood for each and every single one of us, I think that there's actually a lot of positives, but this is where governments need to step in, because if this is as big as we think it's going to be, you're definitely going to have some government intervention.

Mark: There's always going to be different views. I know privacy is a big thing, but when I think about people that are opposed to the idea, I think about how AI is already in our life and I think about your online presence and e-commerce and how based on search patterns, advertising is being pushed to you via artificial intelligence that's gathering that data. I'll speak only for myself, it's made my finding things easier and more tailored and customized, but there are other people that would find it invasive.

Vishal: Extremely. This is what happened with Meta, which is Facebook, and the data that they were using and collecting. When you use a service like that that's free, essentially, the product that they're selling is your data. Yes, privacy is definitely something we need to think about. This goes back to when you think about privacy, privacy laws, and even data and ethical use of data, take a bank, for example, what data can they use? What data can they not use? What can you actually put? These are all things that need to be well thought out and that's why some level of policy and regulation could actually be beneficial to everyone in the ecosystem.

Mark: Speaking of that, and I wanted to actually ask you for an explanation first, I wanted to ask you about the CHIP Act and the ban that's been placed on high-end semiconductors. Let's just go through what that is first and then how's this going to impact the space.

Vishal: Yes, this is interesting because we just mentioned government intervention, policy, and the CHIP Act actually plays into that because the raw, raw, raw of AI is actually compute power and chips. Faster and faster chips is going to allow for faster and faster processing. The CHIP Act is very interesting because if you're the United States of America, if majority of chips are actually manufactured in Taiwan, and so there's huge risk in terms of what happens with Taiwan.

You could read about it in the newspaper, there's ships that are going through the Taiwan Strait, and there's risk every day, especially when you have a lot of manufacturing capacity in Taiwan. What the CHIP Act is actually trying to do is to actually have more manufacturing in the United States and to diversify that manufacturing base away. This tells you how important it is. It's not important because chips are important, it's important because chips are used in everything we do, not just your computer, your data center, everything we're talking about right now works on chips. This is why a company like Nvidia is one of the best-performing companies in the S&P 500 this year.

I would say that the CHIP Act is crucial towards diversifying, but this goes back. Governments are aware of AI, the governments are aware of why it's important, but the second piece is there's actually bans now as well in terms of what you can export because of the military component. I'm going to use Nvidia again as an example. They have something called an A100 chip and that's one of the things driving ChatGPT. You have X number of A100 chips, but if you can't get A100 chips into China, is there military and military uses of some of the things?

We talked about the fear piece earlier, there's a lot of things the mine can come up with in terms of military and military uses. This is why I think the CHIP Act is a huge positive, because it's essentially going to be able to, hopefully, level the manufacturing playing field with respects to Taiwan, the United States. The CHIP Act is more US-focused, but imagine some manufacturing happening in Japan, some manufacturing happening in Europe. Over time, I think going back to the global and policy and leaders, having diversification across the globe is probably a huge benefit.

Mark: Moving away from this specific topic but bringing it back through a conversation that is on everybody's mind these days is inflation. What the heck does inflation have to do with a conversation about AI? How could or does this technology impact inflation and where we see it today?

Vishal: A lot of the questions are connected, and the inflation is a good question. Earlier, you mentioned there's fear and certain people could be more fearful of job and job losses. I'm not sure we're going to have as many job losses, but it goes back sector-to-sector approach. I would say that there's elements of this technology that could be deflationary and there's elements that can actually be inflationary.

A good friend of mine, actually, we had a chat last week, we spent 30 minutes talking about this topic because we spent a lot of time talking about inflation. He's the head of a global investment bank, so he's the one who came up with this notion that it could be a bit deflationary. He's taking that approach of if you've had wage, wage inflation, specifically for the services sector, but when I look a little bit deeper, that could apply to one sector of the economy, but then there's areas of the economy that still have a lot of inflation.

This goes back to our first question, what's going to be disrupted? What's not going to be disrupted? What do you want your kids to do? Plumbers, electricians, tailors? The rates for all of these things have continued to go up. Then when we think about the inflation figure itself, food and energy, and earlier I mentioned food not really going to be too impacted. Energy, maybe a little bit. I'm not sure if this is going to be huge deflationary aspect to AI, but this is why it's a topic a lot of people have been talking about. I think they're looking at it from wage inflation and maybe that services sector, and financial services is a services sector.

Mark: Yes. We're an investing company. This is an investing show. Just recently I saw Morgan Stanley announce that on their wealth management side of their business, they're going to be deploying a customized version of OpenAI product set. We're going to see this into investment banking and basic day-to-day banking and wealth management, for sure. Let's look at it from your perspective as an investor. You're a portfolio manager, you manage portfolios. How is AI being represented in your mandates that you run and how do you see it growing or having a larger impact in client portfolios over the next little while?

Vishal: Yes, this has been something front and center that I've been thinking about for years. This is nothing new. I think earlier you mentioned this is nothing new. If you listen to a conference call from Microsoft or listen to Google or any other big companies, they've been talking about AI for a long period of time. When you look at our funds and you look at the top 10 holdings, you're going to see in the top 10 Apple, Google, Nvidia, and these are not new positions for us. We've been investing in the space for a long, long period of time. It just happens that there's a lot of interest right now, especially with generative AI and people using ChatGPT.

I would say for our mandates, we went through sector by sector what's going to be disrupted, what's not going to be disrupted. We've always taken a balanced approach. We don't run a full tech fund. I don't have an innovators fund or anything like that, and I'm not sure I would want to, and the reason I say that is you want to have that art of portfolio management, I think is one of the things we've talked about in the past.

There's this healthy balance of having things like consumer staples, having some energy, having some materials, having different areas of the market represented in client portfolios, but also including some of this disruptive technology. You want to have things that are going to be around 5, 10, 15 years from now, but you also want to invest in the companies that are leading edge that are going to change the way people work and play. Right now, it's really been the big large mega cap stocks and it's one of the reasons our funds have done well on a year-to-date basis, but also on a three and five-year basis.

The homework that the company and the team and the analysts we mentioned, their job is going to be very interesting over the next two to five years because one of the things we believe is that access matters. One of the things we also have is a lot of access to corporate management teams and traveling. This should be actually one of the questions we need to ask every single company and every single management team, is, "What is your AI strategy? How are you thinking about AI adoption?"

Some of the topics that we just hit right now we're going to get more and more comfortable with. I would say that each and every single portfolio manager, analyst, this is something they should be thinking about in terms of how it's going to change the companies, whether it's from an inflation perspective, a deflation perspective, from a cost perspective, how do you sell your products to how you market your products? I'm very excited about the future and I can't wait to see how this all evolves and it's going to happen in our lifetime.

Mark: Vishal, specifically with respect to the money that you manage, where are you represented sector-wise in terms of artificial intelligence?

Vishal: Yes. There's the direct and then there's the indirect way to think about this. Look, we mentioned the large mega cap tech companies like Microsoft and Nvidia. They're definitely represented in their top 10 holdings across client portfolios. I would say, when we talked about the different use cases, healthcare is another big opportunity and it is represented, and think about robotics and what you could do in terms of robotic surgery and things of that sort.

Then I just mentioned industrial and industrial automation and using robots and industrial automation. I would say we have actually good exposure across sectors. Whether it's industrials or healthcare or technology, I would say 100% we're going to benefit, and clients are going to benefit given all the homework we're doing on this space.

Mark: Leading up to and during the pandemic, we saw the emergence of robo-advice, definitely a form of artificial intelligence in the investing world based on data that's been fed into these systems going through what have been difficult market conditions over the last 18 months. We haven't seen or heard as much about robo-advice. Now we are hearing about, like I mentioned earlier with Morgan Stanley, adopting AI within wealth management processes, but it goes back to your point of man plus machine. You seem to be a big proponent of that. What's your view on how we've seen AI so far in investing and wealth management in places like robo -advisors?

Vishal: This is an interesting one. Take me, for example, I'm a huge believer in Bloomberg. I love Mayor Bloomberg, I recommend the Bloomberg book, Warren Buffet number one on my list, Mayor Bloomberg number two. There's actually something called BloombergGPT that's going to be coming out. I'm a better investor because of my use of Bloomberg. I use the terminal every day. I've been a long term user of the terminal, but this is the perfect example of man plus machines. Take me plus the Bloomberg terminal and we have better outcomes for our clients. That's one way to think about it and that's the future of how you can think about it from a portfolio manager lens.

The robo-advice and the robo-advisor is an interesting one because there's this still idea that you need human touch. I'm a huge believer in human touch. This is why Dynamic Funds invest with advice. A lot of people thought that the role of an advisor was going to go away and you're going to have robo. Don't believe all the hype, because I would say that the role of an advisor has never been more important. That physical touch that we mentioned, what does an advisor do? An advisor actually meets the client, understands their family. This physical idea.

Earlier when we talked about the digital world plus the physical world, I would say that this notion of human touch is extremely important. This is why I think advisors are going to be more and more required in the future. If you have your money and it's just pure robo and interactive, I'm not sure. I don't think a lot of the big robo platforms have taken off in the big way that a lot of people thought the adoption curve was going to happen there.

Now, can an advisor have tools like a Bloomberg? You just mentioned Morgan Stanley Wealth, can you be more efficient? Can you have more tools? Can you look up things faster? Can you maybe have 150 clients instead of a 100 clients maybe? Can these tools make you more efficient 100%? This idea that you're going to have massive job losses and everything is going to be electronic, I'm not sure about that. This is why I believe human touch is important. This is why I believe man plus machine, and that's why I'm super excited.

We haven't talked about the future of work, but this really plays into the future of work because we're talking about efficiency right now. When you think about efficiency and using AI and AI tools for efficiency, you mentioned Morgan Stanley Wealth Management, I'm not a 100% sure what they're going to do, but man plus machine equals three, and going on that notion, if you're going to be more efficient, and this is why I don't think we're going to have that many job losses, can the future of work look like four days? Is AI going to make our lives better? Because if you can be more efficient and you could do your current job in four days, is this something that we could look forward to? Imagine a three-day weekend.

I don't know what the future exactly looks like 5, 10, 15, 20 years from now, but when we think about efficiency, this is the whole thing, you're going to be more productive. If you're going to be more productive, what are you going to be able to do to do with some of your free time? Potentially, this is the first step. What I'm suggesting here is this notion of a four-day work week is something that can happen. I'm not saying today, maybe 20, 30, 40 years down the line as you have more and more adoption.

This is why I'm not so negative on terms of mass jobs and layoffs and the fear that you were talking about, because I still think that you need that human touch. I think we still need people. I still think we're going to have business, we're still going to have office, we're still going to have office towers. I know there's a lot of debate about it. It's going to be Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, but it's just maybe two days in the office, maybe it's two days out of the office.

If these tools can make you more productive and if you can do things from different locations, I think that this is actually going to help society and make us more productive. This what makes me really excited, is technology over time should make us more productive.

Mark: Hearing your comments, the impact is already tangible, but we're literally on just the cusp of this becoming huge. It's growth, whether we look at it from how it's going to impact our lives, and from an investing lens, it's growth. I was reading a recent survey by Accenture, the consulting firm in a study they did, where they said only 12% of major US corporations are using AI tools at a maturity level that achieves a strong competitive advantage. The runway for this to continue to grow and have attention paid to it is massive.

Vishal: We're just scratching the surface today. We stayed very high level. I think that there's a lot to learn for everybody here. Technology, technology adoption, and the future of work is something I'm really excited and passionate about. We are in the business of managing client portfolios and this is going to be exciting times

Mark: Sage advice and great insights in this conversation. I'm going to refer to this particular podcast as part one because there's going to be a lot more to talk about over the next while.

Vishal: 100%. Nobody exactly knows how it's going to play out. To me, it makes it interesting. The world is always uncertain, but that also leads to opportunity. This goes back to invest with advice, this goes back to active management. Everything we stand for I think is going to be super exciting because there's definitely money to be made in this space.

Mark: Well, Vishal, until next time, thanks for joining us. Then to all of our listeners, thanks for joining us again for another edition of On The Money.

Vishal: Great. Thanks for having me.

Mark: You've been listening to another edition of On the Money with Dynamic Funds. For more information on Dynamic and our complete lineup of actively managed funds, contact your financial advisor or visit our website at dynamic.ca. Thanks for joining us.

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