Transcription of The Stock Network Interview with Teaminvest Private Group (ASX:TIP), Head of Funds Management and Education, Sanjee Narendran
Lel Smits: As AI and computing rapidly reshape how investors access, analyse and act on information, the human edge still remains an important part of long-term investing. TeamInvest Private Group owns the TeamInvest investing platform, bringing together a community of self-directed investors focused on moving beyond speculation through disciplined long-term investment frameworks. Its investors collectively deploy more than $3 billion into equities, identifying high-quality businesses capable of compounding earnings over many years.
Ahead of presenting at the Australian Shareholders Association Investor Summit, Future Fortunes Human Edge, Investing in the Age of AI, I’m joined by Head of Funds Management and Education, Sanjeev Narendran, to discuss the human edge in investing as AI and computing continue to transform markets. Sanjeev, welcome back to the Stock Network.
Sanjee Narendran: Thanks, Lel. Great to be here again.
Lel Smits: Wonderful to have you on. Look, we are talking all things AI and AI can process, as we all know, enormous amounts of information in seconds.
But where do you believe humans still have the greatest investing edge when it comes to making successful long-term investing decisions? And also, where are you personally and professionally utilising AI in the investing process?
Sanjee Narendran: Great question. Thanks, Lel. AI is fantastic development for all humankind, really.
What I’m personally more interested in is the compute and the ability to process a lot of the data much, much faster, more so than the intelligence component of the AI, because I still see it as an algorithm. And what it does when you get it straight out of the box is it gives you the most likely outcome. So all the inputs, it just kind of calculates what is the most likely logical response, and that’s going to give you the most likely outcome, which will tend to be an average quality response.
So that response then needs continuous testing and continuous training. So you need to have somebody that looks at that response and says, no, that’s not good enough. Get it better, get it better, get it better.
So you’ve got to train it, and the trainer has to have the intelligence that can tell the AI, keep improving. So you’ll never be able to get the AI to a position where it knows more than the people training it. And the better quality of the trainer, the better the output you can get from AI, but it’s still not going to be able to compete with the intelligence of the individuals.
So we at TeamInvest might use AI to process data a lot faster and get through a lot of our mundane work, but it’s the real human intelligence and the experience that we take into consideration to form our decision making.
Lel Smits: Absolutely. So if we look beyond the data, as AI really becomes increasingly capable of analysing businesses, financial data, also market trends, what are the qualities you think that can’t be easily replicated by technology? Things maybe such as judgment, patience, discipline, also understanding people?
Sanjee Narendran: Yeah, all of those things.
But if you think about it, we all have various aspects of our jobs that we have to do. Just take into an example, you may be a sales executive, but you’ve still got to make presentations, collate data, edit reports, and there’s a whole bunch of stuff. So some areas of the job will perform well above average, and will be exceptional at those areas.
And that’s probably the areas we enjoy and like doing the most. Whereas the other parts of the job where it only requires an average response, or it only requires some level of work to be done to get you a response, you don’t need to spend so much of your time and energy and effort wasted in those areas, where using AI can bridge that gap. So AI will allow us to get through a lot of the areas of our jobs that don’t require anything above average, in terms of an output.
So that way, we can then focus and get a better output with what we do on the areas we enjoy in the areas that we’re above average on. But AI will always have its limitations. I mean, imagine a person that’s a top expert in their field, they’ve got an extensive career with so much experience, someone that sits in the top 1% of their field.
If they were reading a report written by somebody else, they’ll be able to spot details in that report that 99% of other people will miss. AI won’t have the ability to beat that top 1%. So that’s why at TeamInvest, we surround ourselves with people that have deep experience and deep expertise in various industries to get that really high quality information.
Lel Smits: Well, Sanjeev, thank you for the update from TeamInvest and look forward to hearing more at Australian Shareholders Association’s Investor Summit, Future Fortunes, Human Edge, Investing in the Age of AI.
Sanjee Narendran: Look forward to it there.
Ends