Artificial intelligence as a technology is “the biggest waste of time I’ve ever seen,” according to Pete Drewienkiewicz, chief investment officer at U.K. pension consultant Redington.
The comments were made at a panel discussion hosted by TwentyFour Asset Management. Drewienkiewicz disagreed with Rupert Watson, global head of macro and dynamic asset allocation at Mercer, who argued that AI is going to be “pretty material” for future economic development.
When Watson said call centers were using AI to service clients, Drewienkiewicz responded: “All AI does (in customer service) is move a waste of time from the person in the company to me. Eventually I'm going to say, no, I want to speak to someone, I've had enough of this AI rubbish. Right now I'm on the phone for 20 minutes while it just garbles what I said.”
Watson countered that it was his understanding that customer satisfaction with call centers had in certain cases improved with the introduction of AI while reducing overhead. He also said the U.S. economy was going to be resilient and avoid recession, at least in part because of investing in AI technology and supportive regulation on the matter such as the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act.
Yet when it comes to investing, Drewienkiewicz said it was “not a sin” to be underweight Nvidia, a semiconductor manufacturer central to AI development and one of the Magnificent Seven stocks on the S&P 500. He pointed to Redington research that showed an equivalent size investment in the index in Nvidia could be spread to over 20 other companies and could return multiple times on Nvidia in both revenue and earnings.
Watson observed that Nvidia and the remaining Magnificent Seven stocks remained “massively profitable,” with strong balance sheets and industry positions, an outlook he said was markedly different from the companies that crashed when the dot-com bubble burst in 2000. On a technological level, Watson also pointed out that Mercer itself has built an AI platform that he said had already cut costs, and that the technology in time will “displace a whole load of labor.”
