Key takeaways:
- Structural drivers are increasing stock dispersion as aging populations, accelerating healthcare, and AI innovation are strengthening the case for active management.
- A meaningful shift in the monetisation dynamic coupled with productivity gains are addressing investor concerns around AI capex and returns.
- Breakthroughs in biotech and enabling technologies across AI infrastructure highlight long‑term opportunities where commercial outcomes are becoming increasingly visible.
Definitions
Agentic AI: An AI system that uses sophisticated reasoning and iterative planning to autonomously solve complex, multi-step problems. Vast amounts of data from multiple data sources and third-party applications are used to independently analyse challenges, develop strategies and execute tasks.
AI tokens: The fundamental building blocks of input and output that Large Language Models (LLMs) use. They are the smallest units of data used by a LLM to process and generate text/output that is useful.
Bottom-up investing: Focuses on the analysis of individual securities, considering factors impacting company valuation, such as earnings, management team quality, margins, as well as wider economic factors, to identify the best opportunities in a sector or region.
Capex: Capital expenditure is the money a business spends on major, long-term assets such as property and equipment (tangible assets) or technology, software, trademarks, patents etc (intangible assets) to facilitate new projects or investments that support business growth and expansion.
Free cash flow: Cash that a company generates after allowing for day-to-day running expenses and capital expenditure. It can then use the cash to make purchases, pay dividends or reduce debt.
GPU rack: A high-performance computer designed to fit into a standard data center rack, specially equipped with multiple Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) to handle massive parallel processing tasks.
Payer systems: In healthcare, a payer covers the cost of services from healthcare providers. This usually refers to health insurance companies that offer plans covering medical expenses.
ROI (Return on Equity): A financial ratio used to measure the performance of an investment, calculated by dividing net profit/loss by the initial cost of the investment.
TAM (Total Addressable Market: The total potential revenue opportunity available for a product or service if it has 100% market share is achieved. TAM is often used to determine the level of funding or resources that should be invested into a new product or business line.
View transcript
Ali Dibadj: Hey everybody, it’s Ali Dibadj I’m here at the 2026 Asia Investment Summit. I’m joined by Dan Lyons from our healthcare team and Richard Clode from our technology teams. Guys, great to have you here. Now, you’re about to get on stage. Do you want to give us a synopsis of what you’re going to talk about?
Dan Lyons: Yeah, the emphasis of my presentation is really around innovation and the tremendous excitement we’re seeing in the field of healthcare. And I’m going to focus in particular, we had one event that we’ve been waiting for literally the last two years, just occurred last week, a major advance in the field of pancreatic cancer. We have a new therapy that one of our companies developed that could double the survival for patients with pancreatic cancer, which is truly amazing.
Dibadj: Richard.
Richard Clode: So I’m going to talk about, just even in the last six months, I mean, AI has taken a massive leap forward into the agentic kind of era with the launch of [Anthropic Claude] Opus 4.5 late last year. And we really think that that’s really taking a step forward in terms of also just the monetisation, which I think is key to I think a lot of market sort of concerns around this capex spending, will we see a return on investment? And I think we’ve seen with Anthropic’s kind of your releases of their revenue ramp, even in my 23 years of tech investing, I’ve never seen anything like that. So I think that monetisation curve really is starting to pick up. We’re going to have to sort of keep analysing that dynamically, but I think we’ve moved a long way forward even in the last six months, which again should lead to some interesting investment opportunities in the years to come.
Dibadj: Richard, just a deep dive a little bit further into AI. What do you think the market’s not quite getting right about AI right now?
Clode: I think there’s been a lot of concern around that monetisation and that these companies now don’t have any free cash flow. And so will they be able to ultimately spend more? Or even if they do spend more, are they going to see a return on it? And I think just even if we look at the monthly updates from Anthropic, something’s changed. And I think the market’s been a bit slow to react to that. I think we’re starting to see that with Amazon doing a bit better recently. But I think we’re seeing the results in Q1 and then beyond that actually they’re going to have a lot of emphasis on that ROI [return on equity], whether it be cutting headcount to improve margins or demonstrating how they’re going to monetise those tokens. I think that will give a lot more comfort and ultimately support some higher valuations, which have significantly compressed over the last six months.
Dibadj: Dan, one of the words Richard uses is about monetisation. You guys have done such an amazing job at not only supporting new therapies, new ways to save people’s lives, but also make sure that it’s monetisable. It’s actually a good business. How do you do that in the portfolio?
Lyons: Yeah, no, it’s a great point. And I think the best proof point is, we’ve seen an explosion in the number of drugs approved in the last even five years. But right in tandem with that, we’ve seen industry-wide sales and the number of blockbusters also growing right alongside that. And I think that speaks to the fact that these new therapies are not just numbers, they’re actually providing major innovation. And we’ve found, you know, around the world, payer systems, whether it be the US, Europe, or in Asia, are willing to pay for true innovation.
Dibadj: So one of our big themes as a firm is shifting demographics and lifestyles. From a healthcare perspective, from a technology perspective, you all fit right in. How do you think about that big theme as you invest in the portfolio, Dan?
Lyons: Yeah, so one of the things we highlight about healthcare is obviously an aging demographic leads to more healthcare utilisation broadly. So that’s a tailwind for the sector. And then more specifically to themes of aging, we have major advances coming in the field of Alzheimer’s disease. We also have a lot of focus around longevity and living well. And some of the major markets that are emerging, such as the Incretin or GLP-1 obesity market, are helping people to live healthier longer. And that’s a key theme that we want to continue to invest behind.
Dibadj: Richard, how about you?
Clode: I think there’s a lot of focus on AI taking jobs, but the reality of that aging demographic is in actually many developing countries and also in China, we’re just not going to have enough people to do the jobs for an aging population to ultimately provide the productivity and taxes to pay for those longer lives and other pensions and healthcare. So we very much see AI as a solution to that, whether that be on the robotic side or the automation side, but also just boosting productivity in the workplace. And ultimately, that is going to be hopefully one of the solutions to this demographic time bomb that we have.
Dibadj: Now, both of you guys are experts in your crafts, and you and your team do so much work from a bottom-up perspective, meeting management teams, understanding the demographics, understanding the numbers, all this sort of stuff, really deep, deep fingernail-dirty research. What’s the most highest conviction ideas that you have right now? Maybe, Richard, start with you.
Clode: Yeah, I think we saw Jensen Huang [NVIDIA CEO] go lay out the roadmap for his business over in GTC [NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference] just last month. And I mean, an extraordinary amount of innovation. But I think when we look at those roadmaps, we’re looking for opportunities within that. And I think one of the biggest opportunities is scale-up networking. So scale-up networking is, as we densify the compute and try and produce as many tokens as possible out of this data center, we are getting to the physical limits of copper, we’re moving to optical, and actually outside of NVIDIA, we’re seeing more opportunity for other companies to design their own [GPU] racks. And that’s a brand new, enormous TAM over the next few years. So that and then the power considerations from that really do create a lot of opportunities in the optical, in the semi[conductor], and the hardware, sort of component side.
Dibadj: Dan, how about you?
Lyons: I think when I think about the biggest opportunities, they really lie within the biotech sector broadly. And I think one specific example, we went from last week on Monday, actually, I remember, we were celebrating this amazing advance in pancreatic cancer therapy. Immediately, a day later, the team was in Vish’s office on our team, around results of another major new therapy, another advance that we’re equally as excited about. Still in early stages, but this is happening all the time. And the pace of innovation that we’re seeing continues to get faster, I think, driven by new drug modalities, a better understanding of targets. And so I think it’s going to be a really exciting period in the years ahead there.
Dibadj: Dan and Richard, you both personify what we do as a firm, trying to deliver brighter futures for our clients and other people around the world. Thank you very much for your time today. Thank you for delivering for our clients. Thanks for joining us.
References made to individual securities do not constitute a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any security, investment strategy or market sector, and should not be assumed to be profitable. Janus Henderson Investors, its affiliated advisor, or its employees, may have a position in the securities mentioned.
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