Unleashing AI in the Customer Journey

[Music] morning everybody uh great to see you here so I'm Ben ler I'm the market strategist here Toro I'm going to talk about three things very quickly today one how AI is driving stock markets and how I think it's that's going to continue two how the leadership of this adoption in stock markets is retail investors who are very much the New Kids on the Block and very misunderstood and thirdly what this all means for the investment industry so so this is markets US Stocks two-thirds of global stock markets completely super sized within that it's all about the so-called magnificent 7 these big tech tech stocks Apple Amazon Nvidia Tesla uh and on you can see there on the chart on the left just this massive Divergence in performance this year it's all been about these big tech stocks what do they have in common it's all been about AI it's all been about AI adoption and what that is doing to their profits that's left the other 493 stocks in the S&P 500 absolutely in the dust and it's been completely fundamentally driven these seven tech stocks have grown their profits by 50% this year so there's no hype here this is all profit driven reality and the poster child for that is on the right hand side which is NVIDIA it's a trillion dollar market cap stock today I don't need to explain you know Nvidia to you this is the Pix and shovel sort of leader of the AI Revolution what this chart shows you that Top Line is expectations for nvidia's profits over the next year that number has tripled and what that means in stock market terms is that this company is cheaper today than it was at the at the beginning of the year so again no hype this is dollars and cents reality in the stock market today this is tomorrow or 2024 if you want to look at the leftand chart this this is the biggest conundrum or contradiction in markets today if you're an investor we're going to have slower economic growth in the US next year but we're going to have dramatically higher earnings this is not how things are meant to work how do I explain that various reasons inflation's coming down that's helping profit margins there's a low base effect etc etc but the biggest one is AI is driving a profits wedge in here between what's happening to the economy and what's happening to to company profits and this is essentially going to be the trickle down from what we've seen from the Magnificent 7 early Tech adopters this year to the rest of the stocks uh next year and the big hope if you look at the right hand chart This Is Us economic growth over the last 60 years and if it wasn't obvious enough I put a nice green trend line in there growth has been slowing for years why because productivity has been slowing and what AI holds out the opportunity for is that we break this productivity Paradox that we've lived for the last couple of decades and that AI can drive productivity growth across the economy as it gets more broadly uh adopted and we can have stronger growth without uh higher inflation so that's the stock market what the earli adopters here have been retail investors these are the New Kids on the Block this is the fastest growing segment in stock markets uh today it's also the most misunderstood actor in stock markets today why have they been the early adopters on AI and Tech the number in the middle they're 31 years old that's a decade younger than you see in traditional finance and that has two huge implications on the rightand side it drives an early adoption and understanding of tech they're digitally native they're gen Z they're Millennials they were brought up with tech they own a lot of tech stocks they also own a lot of crypto but you know because of this age this early adoption it also means they're not retiring for 30 40 50 years they have time in the market they can take more risk they can compound they can make losses back this is why it's completely rational that they're running more risk than lots of other people and this means that when you look across our platform we have 34 million users 100 countries we just got our UAE license so hopefully a few more here but what we see these are the top 10 Holdings It's All Tech it's all big Tech it's Nvidia it's Microsoft etc etc so this is where the sort of rubber reachs the road for retail investors and then just the final point I wanted what does this mean for the investment business basically AI is coming after our business when we ask retail investors these 34 million what they think about AI just to give you a little snapshot if your Investment Portfolio is pretty up close and personal important 50% more than 50% are open to letting AI run their Investment Portfolio there is a lot of trust out there and these numbers are drifting higher and it's not just those 18 to 34 year olds early adopters the numbers are above 50% for basically all cohorts apart from people nearly my age um and the reasons are across the board there's the technologists in there there's productivity um they think it can provide a better service it make better investment decisions uh and that uh it uh it can be cheaper and then just to sort of delve a little bit into you know us as a you know as a big online platform you know I think this speaks to the general purpose nature of the technology we are using it everywhere we're using it across marketing we're using it in the investment business with new investment portfolios which you can go and see on on the site today we're using it on the trading portfolio uh and we're using it um in in education so really it's across the entire customer journey and we're and we're really just getting started so I just want to leave you those three quick points that AI I think is driving stock markets and it's here to stay that retail investors are the New Kids on the Block and they've really taken the early adoption uh lead here and that thirdly this is coming after our business if you're if you're in the uh investment world and it's coming for it really uh across the board thanks for your time thanks very much