Joshua Pantony, co-founder and CEO of Boosted.ai recently led a webinar titled, “The Future of AI and Investment Management: Advances to Look Out for in 2023”. Josh’s background in AI and machine learning started at the University of Waterloo where he co-founded his first company, Maluuba. Maluuba developed a virtual assistant, like Siri, that, at the time, powered over 50 million devices. In its quest to continue developing cutting-edge AI systems, Microsoft acquired Maluuba. Josh has unique insight into both the development of the AI industry and the specifics of the technology. His experience gives him an inside view of the philosophy behind large tech companies.
AI is the new electricity
Josh described the current macro environment as peculiar owing to the Covid-19 crash, meme stocks, market surge due to vaccine news, regime shift from momentum to value stocks, Fed announcements on quantitative easing, and most of all, fixed income reversing its decades-long trend of going inversely proportional to equities. He also discussed the advancements in NLP (natural language processing) and machine learning, specifically mentioning the success of OpenAI’s chatbot, ChatGPT. Josh shared how AI will directly impact every industry in the world. The financial industry, he says, is one of the less utilized industries when it comes to AI and is still facing fundamental challenges. However, this is starting to change as technology advances and becomes more accessible to investment managers.
Challenges in adopting AI for finance
Josh also spoke about the explosion of data sets and how they are becoming mature enough for machine learning systems to use. However, he pointed out that the financial industry faces a lot of idiosyncratic challenges such as being point in time, changing meaning of terms over time, processing numeric data, and that most AI systems tend to focus on generalized NLP and chat problems. For example, the financial industry has a significant element of numeric data that many current AI systems cannot handle.
The Boosted.ai approach
Josh went on to discuss how Boosted.ai is addressing some of the challenges faced by the financial industry. One of the key features of Boosted.ai is its ability to analyze massive amounts of data, including text and numeric data, and convert it into actionable insights. This allows investment managers to quickly and easily identify trends, make predictions, and respond to market events in real time. Additionally, Boosted.ai’s platform, Boosted Insights, is highly customizable, allowing investment managers to tailor it to their specific needs and requirements.
Josh concluded by discussing the future of AI and investment management and what advances to look out for in 2023. He also emphasized that the financial industry is poised to reap the benefits of AI and that investment management is a field that will see significant advancements in the near future.
You can watch the replay of the webinar below:
