Janus Henderson Live: Investing responsibly in the power of AI

Narrator: Janus Henderson live. Madrid investment summit.

Michelle Dunstan: Hi everyone. Today, together with Alison and Dan, we’re going to talk about how to navigate the risks and opportunities in artificial intelligence.

Alison Porter: We have over 5,000 autonomous vehicles in the US already. Dan will talk more on robotics. Amazon Project Vulcan has robots that can actually feel, again that requires additional sensors. It requires machine vision and additional connectivity.

Dunstan: I think people think about economic disruption, but also they’re afraid that the machines are going to steal our jobs. What do you think about that?

Porter: And as a portfolio manager, I’m also a parent with teenage kids. And I think about that a lot and their career progression. And I think it’s really important that we prioritise critical thinking.

I think China has taken this holistic approach to AI training, and part of that is because where they sit in terms of demographics, and that’s why AI really matters, and AI diffusing the demographic timebomb in a number of different ways, from physical productivity of exoskeletons, you know, through to autonomous vehicles that we talked about and healthcare.

Dunstan: We don’t hear as much about healthcare and AI. Should we be hearing about it more?

Dan Lyons: Yeah, that’s a great question, and hopefully I can convince you that there are many examples across health care where AI is being used today, and we’ll see even more examples in the future. The next generation of devices that are in the market today provide training tools that help, you know, maybe a mediocre surgeon learn from the best. How could they do better in procedures and in future iterations of the of the robot, the system will actually intervene and stop the surgeon if they’re about to do something that might have a deleterious outcome for the for the patient.

And it turns out that cancer cells deliver a unique fragment of DNA fragments within the, within the blood and, and in fact, a fingerprint for what could be an early cancer. And companies that have leveraged AI to distil down this really complex problem, to find that needle in a haystack, to better identify it at an early level of cancers. And as a result of that, we already have products on the market that now can screen for 50 different cancer types that before had nothing available.

So healthcare, unfortunately, is a field that’s known a lot for inefficiency. And in these charts here, you’ll see that the US is winning, but it’s actually not a race you want to win. We’re spending the most as a percentage of GDP around the world, but our outcomes are actually fairly middling. In our portfolios at Janus Henderson, we’re trying to find companies that are able to improve the efficiency of delivery of health care.

Dunstan: All of these reasons make AI extremely complex, and that is why we believe you need active research and engagement. Those companies, the ones that are using AI in innovative ways, but with responsibility, are the ones that are going to be prepared to succeed in the long term, and that active research and engagement underpins everything we do at Janus Henderson. It’s that information that gives us better insights to make better investment decisions, and that’s what it means to us to invest in a brighter future together.

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