Franklin Templeton CEO Jenny Johnson's Optimistic Take on AI and the Future of Work

So I actually think it's kind of the opposite of that. I think the scary thing is not to bring in that younger generation. I had two things with my son and nephew that kind of light bulb went off for me. So my son is a research analyst in one of Franklin's investment teams and, you know, he's six months into his job and he says, 'Mom, I've been assigned to help build the AI prompts.' And I said, 'Well, you should go talk to Jonathan Curtis. He's kind of the guru in our equity team. He's doing all the AI work there. He's amazing. You get some feel from him and he can give you some ideas.' And Jonathan came back and he said, 'Wow, I was really impressed with your son and the AI prompts. They were better than a lot of the ones that our own team came up with.' So I went back to my son, I said, 'Okay, you're six months into the job. How did you have those AI prompts?' He goes, 'I just kept feeding it into ChatGPT and asking it to improve it, right?' But you could have never imagined that if you're an expert, you can't possibly imagine that it's going to actually be that insightful. And so you'll resist it. And my nephew said, he works at an AI company. He goes, he says, 'Auntie Jenny, I'm the worst programmer there. I'm the worst engineer there, but I generate the most code because I'm the one who uses AI the most to help me write the code.' Now, he's still guiding it, but he's writing it. So, to me, the mistake companies will make is if they think from a cost-cutting standpoint, don't hire these younger people who don't think twice about these tools and will probably look at something you're doing and say, 'Why would you ever do that? You should do it this way.' And so what we're doing is we're hiring a class of people. We won't guarantee you a job at the end of two years, but we're going to keep you for two years right out of college, rotating you around the firm. And the key is we're trying to figure out what is the skill set. You know, it's not necessarily that we just hire a finance and economics person. It might be that they're more creative, more liberal arts. I'm not sure. We're going through this process right now: what are the characteristics of those individuals? To make sure they're curious enough, we bring them into the firm so they can infuse that kind of skill of being comfortable leveraging these tools.

Yeah, I mean, every time there is a great technological advance, there is this prediction that we're all going to be unemployed, because it's hard to see around corners to know what the opportunities are. And the only concern here is that it's moving so fast. But I use the example of the famous picture on Wall Street where there was, I think it was 1910, all horse and buggies and one car. And then 10 years later, the same picture is one horse and buggy and all cars. And I'm pretty sure the people taking care of the horses didn't become mechanics, right? So it's hard; there is this adjustment period that happens. But if you look in 1997, the cover of Business Week said 'The Death of the Broker' — the internet was going to destroy the financial adviser. They are stronger today than ever, doing way more things for their clients. And I look at the iPhone: did we ever envision when it was launched that this device would have all these apps that we now can't live without? So I don't know. I trust in human nature. But I can't see around corners to say, you know, everybody's predicting that you're not going to need any programmers anymore, and most IT departments would tell you no, I'm just going to have a lot more stuff. There's a bunch of things we want to do. So no, I still need them. I'm just excited that I can get more done. So I just look in history and say we always seem to bounce back from this. I think it's going to be the same thing here. I'm an optimist. And I don't know to what degree you've been involved in Anthropic or OpenAI, but obviously these have become some of the most important companies on the earth to this point, with valuations that I certainly didn't see coming a few years ago. How have you been involved in those companies? How do you think about the current valuations? How do you think about their ability to extract enough value, despite there being some commodity-like aspects of what they do? Yeah, I mean, it's hard. So Google just came out with their free service on that. And so what does that do ultimately to Anthropic? At some point, Google's probably going to want to get paid. Remember, they were free in search originally; then you got all these ads. So these are powerful and everybody's using them and wanting to use them. So I think at least as long as this growth trajectory continues, there is huge value. And I think we're only starting to unlock the capabilities of leveraging these tools broadly in your business. Anthropic is not yet embedded in the engine of somebody's investment decision or an application that our teams use to go out and talk to financial advisors, but they are getting embedded in these things, and all those are going to be revenue generating.