Citadel CEO Ken Griffin was a prominent AI skeptic. Now he says, 'AI is real.'

Ah, Ken Griffin has seen the light. The Citadel CEO, previously a proud AI skeptic—probably scoffing over a glass of expensive Bordeaux—now declares that AI is 'profoundly more powerful' than even its champions claimed. What a beautiful, almost inevitable mea culpa. One imagines Griffin staring at his Bloomberg terminal one morning and realising the numbers were crunching themselves. 'Work once done by highly trained finance professionals is now done by AI agents over hours or days,' he announces, as if discovering fire for the first time.

And so the great reshuffling of finance begins. Those 'highly trained' analysts who spent years mastering discounted cash flow models are now surplus to requirements, replaced by agents that never sleep, never ask for a promotion, and certainly never talk back. Griffin's reversal comes on the heels of similar admissions from other hedge funds, but it's particularly rich given his prior skepticism—he thought AI wouldn't handle market complexity, only to find it actually trades better than most humans. The corporate euphemisms will be glorious: 'rightsizing,' 'machine-enabled optimisation,' 'reallocating human capital.' But the message is clear: if your job can be described in a flowchart, you are already obsolete.

Still, we should thank Ken for his honesty. His conversion is the financial sector's equivalent of a death knell for middle-office jobs, delivered with the cheerful air of a man who just discovered a new source of alpha. And isn't that the heart of it? AI isn't real because of some research breakthrough; it's real because it makes billionaires even more billions. So raise a glass to Ken Griffin, the reluctant prophet of automation. His skepticism was charming while it lasted, but the market—and the machines—always win.