Alibaba’s Chairman Joe Tsai speaking at CNBC’s CONVERGE LIVE event in Singapore on Wednesday.
CNBC
Artificial intelligence may eliminate the need for research analysts in the future, Alibaba‘s Chairman Joe Tsai said Wednesday at CNBC’s CONVERGE LIVE event in Singapore.
“Equity research analysts can be completely replaced … you can ask it to put together a report on Nvidia or Apple, and it’ll do a great job,” he told CNBC’s David Faber.
That doesn’t mean, however, that analyst roles will be eliminated altogether, he said during CNBC’s two-day live event at Jewel Changi Airport.
“I don’t think it’ll entirely replace human beings. It’ll just actually enhance the quality of work,” he said.
“I think the quality of research can really be improved if a lot of the mundane research related stuff can be done by the machine, and then humans can apply their judgment and make better recommendations.”
AI also stands to fundamentally change the practice of law, he said, citing his own background as an attorney.
“When you write a contract … the whole document has to fit well together, every sentence, every definition, has to fit with each other. Well, AI can do a lot of that, I would say most of it,” he said. “Does that mean in the future, lawyers will be replaced by AI? Not necessarily.”
He said that when clients hire “sophisticated lawyers,” they are really asking for counsel.
“Counsel is not something that is technical, or black and white — it is judgment,” he said. “I still think that these jobs can just be enhanced by AI rather than being replaced.”
This is a developing story. Please refresh for updates.