Even people who were skeptical of AI until very recently are coming around to what it’s capable of.
Ken Griffin, the billionaire founder and CEO of Citadel — one of the most successful hedge funds in history — has come out with a striking admission: AI has crossed a threshold, and the work once reserved for finance professionals with master’s degrees and PhDs is now being done by AI agents in a fraction of the time.
“In the last few months, there has been a step change function in the productivity of the AI toolkit,” Griffin said. “It is profoundly more powerful than it was just nine months ago. And for us at Citadel, that has allowed us to unleash a much broader array of use cases for AI.”
What makes this notable is the context. Just a month ago, Griffin had told Stanford Graduate School of Business students that Citadel uses AI “a little bit” and that he couldn’t call it “game-changing” — that it was, in his words, “a productivity enhancement tool.” Now he is describing something categorically different.
“It has been really interesting to watch — 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 being done by AI agents over the course of hours or days.”
Griffin was careful to stress that this isn’t about low-level or mid-tier work being automated. “These are not mid-tier white-collar jobs. These are extraordinarily high-skilled jobs being — and I’m going to pick a word — being automated by agentic AI.”
The personal impact wasn’t lost on him. “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. 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. That’s the first time I’ve seen real impact in our four walls.”
But Griffin didn’t stop there. He also offered a pointed counterweight. A Harvard paper had described a phenomenon researchers called “AI work slop” — output that looks polished and credible on the surface but falls apart under scrutiny. Griffin said he’d seen exactly this play out internally. A colleague running Citadel’s commodities business showed him an AI-generated report. “The first few sentences — wow, that’s really insightful — and then you go down below that and it’s all garbage.”
It’s a telling tension: AI is capable enough to replace months of high-skilled work, yet still unreliable enough to produce convincing-sounding nonsense just a few lines in.
Griffin’s remarks land at a moment when the evidence of AI’s impact on the high-skilled workforce is becoming harder to ignore. S&P 500 company headcounts fell in 2025 for the first time since 2016 — a drop of roughly 400,000 jobs — with companies like Salesforce and Klarna explicitly citing AI as a reason to halt human hiring. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has predicted AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within one to five years, while an Anthropic researcher put a harder deadline on it — near-certain automation of any white-collar job by 2027 or 2028. What Griffin is describing from inside Citadel isn’t a theoretical future. It’s already happening in one of the world’s most demanding financial environments, at the very top of the cognitive skills ladder. The “AI work slop” caveat is real, but it’s increasingly starting to look like a temporary limitation rather than a permanent ceiling.