I recently read a Barron’s column by Jack Hough with an unexpectedly cheerful title: “Why OpenAI’s Economist Is Bullish on Humans.”
Hough spoke with OpenAI’s chief economist, Ronnie Chatterji, about what happens when people use AI as an assistant. AI can help with research, analysis, and unfamiliar tasks. That may leave more room for the work people are especially good at: asking useful questions, exercising judgment, and understanding other people.
As a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER ®, I find that possibility encouraging. A tool that helps us sort through information faster could give us more time to listen carefully and think through what a decision means for someone’s life.
Then Hough’s column took a wonderfully strange turn. He described research into clues about corporate leadership that you might never find in a spreadsheet. One study associated CEOs’ personal use of corporate jets with weaker shareholder returns. Other researchers examined the prominence of a CEO’s photograph in an annual report and how often the CEO said “I” rather than “we.” Together with other measures, those details helped them study whether a leader’s self-focus affected company decisions and performance.
I would never buy or sell a stock because of a photograph or a pronoun. But this research reminded me of something I heard Warren Buffett say in person at my first Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting in 2015. When he walks into a company and sees a marble lobby or a large fountain, he wonders whether its leaders are building a monument to themselves rather than focusing on shareholders.
A grand lobby, like a CEO photograph, tells us very little on its own. Still, it can prompt a worthwhile question about priorities. Numbers do not tell us everything about a business. Its people, culture, and leadership matter too.
That is where the upbeat AI story and the peculiar CEO story meet for me. AI may become remarkably good at finding information and spotting patterns. We still have to decide which patterns mean something, which questions are worth asking, and how to use an answer wisely.
I’m excited to see what AI can help us do. I’m equally interested in the human judgment we bring to the work.
Inspired by Jack Hough’s “Why OpenAI’s Economist Is Bullish on Humans,” published in Barron’s.