After previously brushing off AI as overhyped, Ken Griffin, Citadel's CEO, now says the technology has reached a point where it can take on tasks once reserved for highly skilled finance talents.
The comment stands in stark contrast to remarks he made during the World Economic Forum in Davos earlier this year, where he argued that while AI appeared impressive on the surface, “as soon as you dig deeper, it’s all garbage.”
In his recent statement during a conversation with professors at Stanford Graduate School of Business, Ken Griffin remarked that “in the last few months, there has been a step change function in the productivity of AI toolkit,” while adding that it is now “profoundly more powerful than it was just nine months ago.”
His remarks add to growing claims from CEOs across industries that AI is increasingly capable of doing work once handled by highly skilled white-collar professionals, pushing many companies to rethink how they operate. According to him, it has allowed Citadel, an American multinational hedge fund and financial services company, to unleash a much broader array of use cases for AI.
How AI is Impacting Work
Much of AI’s impact on jobs has so far played out inside the tech industry, where tools such as OpenAI’s Codex and Anthropic’s Claude Code are increasingly being used to speed up software engineering work. Tasks that once took teams of developers days or weeks can now be completed in significantly less time. Companies, including Cloudflare, have also pointed to AI efficiencies as part of broader workforce reductions.
From Griffin’s point of view, the development highlights how far AI has progressed, with the technology now reaching a stage where it can handle work once reserved for highly trained finance professionals.
“For the first time, AI is real,” he said, pointing to what he observed inside the company. “When you witness it in your own four walls, when you see work that used to take many years of work being done in days or weeks, it’s like, wow."
What This Means for Skilled Talents
With white-collar work increasingly being automated through agentic AI, productivity gains are becoming hard to ignore. “You get a 15 or 20% boost, or even a 25% boost,” he said, pointing to the efficiency improvements.
Griffin noted that the impact is even more striking in research-heavy roles. “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.”
This, he suggested, is already reshaping what talent looks like inside firms.
Moreso, this is also something that has been seen across big tech in recent years, where layoffs have followed increasing automation and AI adoption.
However, he argued that the bigger change is how people will need to adapt going forward.
“The success in your career will be defined by whether or not you are a lifelong learner,” Griffin said, adding that AI will only make that even more important.
As AI continues to move from an experiment to an everyday tool, the gap between human work and machine output seems to be growing more blurred, reshaping how companies define productivity and the kind of work that still requires people.
