Episode 554: Stifel CEO Ron Kruszewski on AI as an Accelerator and Why Humans Still Win

SPEAKER_1 (0:12)

Welcome in to another episode. Today's guest is Ron Kruszewski. He is the CEO of Stifel. Ron, thanks so much for joining us. Happy to have you here.

Ron Kruszewski (0:21)

It's always great to come to New York, and especially come to the New York Stock Exchange. So I am pleased to be here. Thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_1 (0:27)

We're always happy to have you here. So I want to start our conversation on really probably the most relevant and most talked about topic in all of life, really, not just in business, but that's AI. And the technology is everywhere. It's impacting so much of our lives and reshaping industries at an incredible pace. Some seems like it's new, not only every month, every year, but almost every day at this point, there's something new coming. When you look at AI now, and specifically, AI's future for financial services, do the possibilities, do they energize you, or does a part of you feel hesitation, caution, worry, or dare I say, even fear about what AI could be, not only for financial services, but just for you and I sitting here on a daily basis?

Ron Kruszewski (1:16)

Well, you know what? It's a great question. I think you have to separate them, all right? You have to, let's talk about the business side of it. And even how my thinking has evolved, this year, I mean, this year, remember in January, if you would have said mythos or mythos, you wouldn't have, people would have said what? They didn't know. And so when you think about just how much has transpired in the eight months of this year, and then project that forward, and that is a, from a business perspective, I view as opportunity. I view it as a tool. I got in the business in 1981, and I sat down to an IBM computer that no one knew how to use. Put the floppy disk in, and was a computer audit specialist, and accelerated my career because of that tool that was thought is going to be replaced every, and it did, it did change. But what happened was people just became more productive. And so one of the things that I've learned, I was the first person that was saying, this will replace like young analysts, for example, it's, you know, you don't need, well, it's just the opposite. We need more people because we're getting more opportunities. So AI on that side is, I think is a very, very productive tool. It's not going to replace human judgment.

But now that dovetails into the second part of your question, which is, you know, there was a recent article in The Economist, if I can say that, but it was, you know, can AI gain consciousness? And then, and that's the scary part of all of this. And I, and so the business side of me is very optimistic.

The personal side of me that thinks about my kids and my grandkids, there is a fear of, you know, of, of the unknown. And of course we've all seen The Terminator and all of those things. And, you know, Singularity, remember that word. So, but let's not, you know, let's not sell human short just yet.

SPEAKER_1 (3:20)

Absolutely. And I think the fear of all people comes from, you know, there are thousands of use cases that have already been discovered, obviously, right? AI is being used across industries, across our deadly life.

But I think the fear comes from the fact that there are still probably thousands, if not millions of use cases yet to be discovered. And it remains to be seen what those use cases are, you know, whether or not they are productive or harmful to society as a whole, whether or not beneficial or more of a burden on society as a whole too, right? What those use cases are, I think, will largely dictate how business is done in the future, how people are trained in the future, how people study in the future. Because while I agree with you, I don't think AI will replace jobs. I think we will always need that balance between human and technology. It'll be interesting to see how people learn and how people grow to now have AI besides them. Because I think someone like me, when I went to school, I wasn't studying with the thought that AI would be beside me, but now yet AI is here. So I think we'll have to sort of retrain or people have to sort of relearn, not necessarily life, but how they work with AI right beside them.

Ron Kruszewski (4:30)

Well, it's a tool, again, back, my dad didn't have a Hewlett Packer 12C and had to do, he didn't, he was a fireman, but the people that would do M&A back then did it on spreadsheets, and not spreadsheets, write it down. And so you've had a lot of tools and I view AI as a tool. One of the things that I noticed really, first of all, and this probably speaks to where we are in AI, doesn't mean it won't change. But I tell people, I say, look, it's an accelerator. And they'll say, what do you mean it's an accelerator? And I'll say, well, if you really know what you're doing, it makes you much smarter.