Citadel CEO Ken Griffin has finally joined the AI hype train.
While many CEOs have been saying for years that AI can do the work of many white-collar professionals, and remaking their companies accordingly, Griffin had been a notable holdout.
At the beginning of the year, during a panel discussion at the World Economic Forum in Davos, the hedge fund billionaire said AI was impressive on the surface, but as soon as you dug deeper, “it’s all garbage.”
Griffin has long been seen as one of AI’s most prominent skeptics.
Earlier this month, however, during a conversation with professors at Stanford Business School, Griffin took a starkly different view.
“I got to tell you, I went home one Friday, actually fairly depressed,” Griffin said. “You could just see how this was going to have such a dramatic impact on society.”
Griffin said AI had become “profoundly more powerful” than it was nine months ago, and had allowed the hedge fund to “unleash” a wider range of use cases for the technology.
“For the first time, AI is real,” he said.
While AI has impacted all kinds of jobs, it’s been most visible in the tech industry, where bots like OpenAI’s Codex and Anthropic’s Claude Code are doing the work of software engineers in vastly compressed timelines. Tech companies like Cloudflare have laid off thousands of employees, citing AI’s ability to do their work instead.
Now, Griffin says the technology is at a place where it can do work once reserved for highly trained finance professionals.
“To be blunt, work that we would usually do with people with master’s and PhDs in finance over the course of weeks or months is being done by AI agents over the course of hours or days,” Griffin said.
He emphasized that this goes beyond what he called “mid-tier white-collar jobs” that are now being automated with agentic AI.
While AI-assisted software engineering has delivered productivity gains — “you get a 15 or 20% boost or 25% boost,” he said — he described the impact on research as more jarring.
“When you’re seeing really high-level research being done by AI engines, it’s, it’s quite eye-opening,” Griffin said. Work that used to take humans years is now being done in days or weeks, he added.
The broader implication, he said, is that both companies and workers will need to become more adaptable.
“The success in your career will be defined as to whether or not you will be a lifelong learner or not, and AI will just make this all the more important,” Griffin said.
