NEW YORK (VINnews) Citadel founder and CEO Ken Griffin described a dramatic recent leap in artificial intelligence capabilities, saying agentic AI systems are now performing work once requiring teams of finance professionals with master’s and doctoral degrees in a fraction of the time.
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In remarks at the Stanford Leadership Forum, Griffin said there has been a “step change” in the productivity of AI tools over the last few months, making them “profoundly more powerful” than they were just nine months earlier.
“And for us at Citadel, that has allowed us to unleash a much broader array of use cases for AI,” Griffin said. “It has been really interesting to watch, to be blunt, work that we would usually do with people with masters and PhDs in finance over the course of weeks or months being done by AI agents over the course of hours or days.”
“These are not mid-tier white collar jobs,” he added. “These are like extraordinarily high skilled jobs being, I’m going to pick a word, automated by agentic AI.”
Griffin said the rapid progress left him unsettled. “I gotta tell you, I went home one Friday actually fairly depressed by this because you could just see how this was going to have such a dramatic impact on society,” he said. “When you witness it in your own four walls, when you see work that used to be man years of work being done in days or weeks, it’s like, wow.”
The comments mark a notable shift in tone for Griffin, who earlier this year cautioned that much of the broader AI investment boom is driven by hype needed to justify massive spending on data centers and infrastructure.
Citadel, which manages about $66 billion, is among the world’s largest hedge funds. Griffin’s observations echo growing reports from finance and technology leaders about accelerating AI adoption in analytical and research roles that traditionally demanded advanced human expertise.
Industry observers have noted similar transformations, with some predicting significant changes to white-collar workflows in the coming years. Griffin’s account highlights tangible productivity gains already visible inside one of the industry’s most sophisticated trading operations.