Rogo President Rahul Rekhi argues AI will eliminate repetitive tasks like data entry and manual calculations, freeing analysts for strategic work on acquisitions and IPOs. He compares the current wave to the spreadsheet revolution, when similar fears proved unfounded, and says AI will expand rather than shrink the analyst role.
Chapters
How do you at Rogo address concerns from junior analysts or other finance professionals who may feel threatened by your AI analyst vision? Right, so the first thing I'll say, Ethan, is coming back to my comment.
Earlier about client empathy.
I started on Wall street as a.
Junior associate, so I know full well.
The nature of that associate experience.
And it's my conviction that I will.
Create more work and frankly more rewarding and enriching work for associates and analysts and other professionals on Wall street is rooted in my own experiences. And in particular I found being an.
Associate immensely fascinating as I was able to move past the drudgery, the kind.
Of manual labor of making sure the right logo is in the right place and data entry was conducted accurately and more toward helping a client make an ultimately transformative decision for their company, whether that's an acquisition or an IPO or something similar. That was immensely stimulating. But you had to trudge through that.
Very in the weeds grind to get to that point.
And I think one of the reasons we're all excited about Rogo and AI.
In this space is it allows talented.
Professionals to get right to that point of delivering strategic insight to a client and allow the machines, allow AI to traverse that basic drudgery, do the groundwork, do the legwork so that you can actually deliver great advice. And that's what we're excited about first and foremost.
I will also say that this is.
In many ways a natural extension of a long running debate and threat on Wall Street. You know, our, our predecessors across the generations, for example, were focused on when electronic spreadsheets just came out and we had VisiCalc and the first versions of Excel.
There was a concern of what's this.
Going to do to all our junior professionals that are manually doing calculations in physical versions of spreadsheets when again, you.
Can have software that does these calculations instantaneously.
And if you look at where we.
Are now, we have more finance and.
Investment banking and private equity, et cetera, professionals than we've ever had in the history of financial markets. And the work they're doing is inherently more intellectually stimulating, enriching and value add.
Than the work of again, sort of manually doing calculations on paper, pre visicalc.
And so again, lots of conviction that the same will be true of this generation of technology and that will ultimately open up new vistas and markets for the kind of great financial advice and transactions to be delivered because of the.
Efficiencies and the economies of AI being.
Able to do that base layer of.
Work more or less autonomous. So I think it's an exciting future for finance professionals.
