Category: 3. Business

Kathryn Huberty: Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I’m Katy Huberty, Morgan Stanley’s Global Head of Research, and I’m joined by Stephen Byrd, Global Head of Thematic Research, and Jeff McMillan, Morgan Stanley’s Head of Firm-Wide AI.

Today and tomorrow, we have a special two-part episode on the number one question everyone is asking us: What does the future of work look like as we scale AI?

It’s Tuesday, November 4th at 10am in New York.

I wanted to talk to you both because Stephen, your groundbreaking work provides a foundation for thinking through labor and economic impacts of implementing AI across industries. And Jeff, you’re leading Morgan Stanley’s efforts to implement AI across our more than 80,000 employee firm, requiring critical change management to unlock the full value of this technology.

Let’s start big picture and look at this from the industry level, and then tomorrow we’ll dig into how AI is changing the nature of work for individuals. 

Stephen, one of the big questions in the news – and from investors – is the size of AI adoption opportunity in terms of earnings potential for S&P 500 companies and the economy as a whole. What’s the headline takeaway from your analysis?

Stephen Byrd: Yeah, this is the most popular topic with my children when we talk about the work that I do. And the impacts are so broad. So, let’s start with the headline numbers. We did a deep dive into the S&P 500 in terms of AI adoption benefits. The net benefits based on where the technology is now, would be about little over $900 billion. And that can translate to well over 20 percent increased earnings power that could generate over $13 trillion of market cap upon adoption. And importantly, that’s where the technology is now.

So, what’s so interesting to me is the technology is evolving very, very quickly. We’ve been writing a lot about the nonlinear rate of improvement of AI. And what’s especially exciting right now is a number of the American labs, the well-known companies developing these LLMs, are now gathering about 10 times the computational power to train their next model. If scaling laws hold that would result in models that are about twice as capable as they are today. So, I think 2026 is going to be a year in terms of thinking about where we’re headed in terms of adoption. So, it’s frankly challenging to basically take a snapshot because the picture is moving so quickly.

Kathryn Huberty: Stephen, you referenced just the fast pace of change and the daily news flow. What’s the view of the timeline here? Are we measuring progress at the industry level in months, in years?

Stephen Byrd: It’s definitely in years. It’s fast and slow. Slow in the sense that, you know, it’s taken some companies a little while now and some over a year to really prepare. But now what we’re seeing in our CIO survey is many companies are now moving into the first, I’d say, full fledged adoption of AI, when you can start to really see this in numbers.

So, it sort of starts with a trickle, but then in 2026, it really turns into something much, much bigger. And then I go back to this point about non-linear improvement. So, what looks like, areas where AI cannot perform a task six months from now will look very different. And I think – I’m a former lawyer myself. In the field of law, for example, this has changed so quickly as to what, AI can actually do. So, what I expect is it starts slow and then suddenly we look at a wide variety of tasks and AI is fairly suddenly able to do a lot more than we expect.

Kathryn Huberty: Which industries are likely to be most impacted by the shift? And when you broke down the analysis to the industry and job level, what were some of the surprises?

Stephen Byrd: I thought what we would see would be fairly high-tech oriented sectors – and including our own – would be top of the list. What I found was very different. So, think instead of sectors where there’s fairly low profit per employee, often low margin businesses, very labor-intensive businesses. A number of areas in healthcare staples came to the top. A few real [00:04:00] estate management businesses. So, very different than I expected.

The very high-tech sectors actually had some of the lowest numbers, simply because those companies in high-tech tend to have extremely high profit per employee. So, the impact is a lot less. So that was surprising learning. A lot of clients have been digging into that.

Kathryn Huberty: I could see why that would’ve surprised you. But let’s focus on banking for a moment since we have the expert here. Jeff, what are some of the most exciting AI use cases in banking right now?

Jeff McMillan: You know, I would start with software development, which was probably the first Gen AI use case out of the gate. And not only was it first, but it continues to be the most rapidly advancing. And that’s probably, mostly a function of the software, you know, development community. I mean, these are developers that are constantly fiddling and making the technology better.

But productivity continues to advance at a linear pace. You know, we have over 20,000 folks here at Morgan Stanley. That’s 25 percent of our population. We have more people building software than we have financial advisors. And, you know, the impact both in terms of the size of that population and the efficiencies are really, really significant.

So, I would start there. And then, you know, once you start moving past that, it may not seem, you know, sexy. It’s really powerful around things like document processing. Financial services firms move massive amounts of paper. We take paper in, whether it be an account opening, whether it be a contract. Somebody reads that information, they reason about it, and then they type that information into a system. AI is really purpose built for that.

And then finally, just document generation. I mean, the number of presentations, portfolio reviews, you know, even in your world, Katy, research reports that we create. Once again, AI is really just – it’s right down the middle in terms of its ability to generate just content and help people reduce the time and effort to do that.

Kathryn Huberty: There’s a lot of excitement around AI, but as Stephen mentioned, it’s not a linear path. What are the biggest challenges, Jeff, to AI adoption for a big global enterprise like Morgan Stanley? What keeps you up at night?

Jeff McMillan: I’ve often made the analogy that we own a Ferrari and we’re driving around circles in a parking lot. And what I mean by that is that the technology has so far advanced beyond our own capacity to leverage it. And the biggest issue is – it’s our own capacity and awareness and education.

So, you know what keeps me up at night? it’s the firm’s understanding. It’s each person’s and each leader’s ability to understand what this technology can do. Candidly, it’s the basics of prompting. We spend a lot of time here at the firm just teaching people how to prompt, understanding how to speak to the machine because until you know how to do that, you don’t really understand the art of the possible. I tell people, if you have $100 to spend, you should start spending [$]90, on educating your employee base. Because until you do that, you cannot effectively get the best out of the technology.

Kathryn Huberty: And as we look out to 2026, what AI trends are you watching closely and how are we preparing the firm to take advantage of that?

Jeff McMillan: You and I were just out in Silicon Valley a couple of weeks ago, and seemingly overnight, every firm has become an agentic one. While much of that is aspirational, I think it’s actually going to be, in the long term, a true narrative, right?

We’ve already built several agents ourselves. And what I would describe them as true agents – ones that actually are able to plan and act and reason on their own and execute tasks, multi-threaded. With humans still in the loop but are able to do more than just respond to a question. And we’re starting to scale. And I think that step where we are right now is really about experimentation, right? I think we have to learn which tools work, what new governance processes we need to put in place, where the lines are drawn. I think we’re still in the early stage, but we’re leaning in really hard.

We’ve got about 20 use cases that we’re experimenting with right now. As things settle down and the vendor landscape really starts to pan out, we’ll be down position to fully take advantage of that.

Kathryn Huberty: A key element of the agentic solutions is linking to the data, the tools, the application that we use every day in our workflow. And that ecosystem is developing, and it feels that we’re now on the cusp of those agentic workflow applications taking hold.

Stephen Byrd: So, Katy, I want to jump in here and ask you a question too. With your own background as an IT hardware analyst, how does the AI era compare to past tech or computing cycles? And what sort of lessons from those cycles shape your view of the opportunities and challenges ahead?

Kathryn Huberty: The other big question in the market right now is whether an AI bubble is forming. You hear that in the press. It’s one of the questions all three of us are hearing regularly from clients. And implicit in that question is a view that this doesn’t look like past cycles, past trends. And I just don’t believe that to be the case.

We actually see the development of AI following a very similar path. If you go back to mainframe and then minicomputer, the PC, internet, mobile, cloud, and now AI. Each compute cycle is roughly 10 times larger in terms of the amount of installed compute.

The reality is we’ve gone from millions to billions to trillions, and so it feels very different. But the reality is we have a trillion dollars of installed CPU compute, and that means we likely need $10 trillion of installed GPU compute. And so, we are following the same pattern. Yes, the numbers are bigger because we keep 10x-ing, but the pattern is the same. And so again, that tells us we’re in the early innings. You know, we’re still at the point of the semiconductor technology shipping out into infrastructure. The applications will come.

The other pattern from past cycles is that exponential growth is really difficult for humans to model. So, I think back to the early days when Morgan Stanley’s technology team was really bullish, laying the groundwork for the PC era, the internet era, the mobile era. When we go back and look at our forecasts, we always underestimated the potential. And so that would suggest that what we’ve seen with the upward earnings revisions for the AI enablers and soon the AI adopters is likely to continue.

And so, I see many patterns, you know, that are thread across computing cycles, and I would just encourage investors to realize that AI so far is following similar patterns.

Jeff McMillan: Katy, you make the point that much of the playbook is the same. But is there anything fundamentally different about the AI cycle that investors should be thinking about?

Kathryn Huberty: The breadth of impact to industries and corporates, which speaks to Stephen’s work. We have now four times over mapped the 3,700 companies globally that Morgan Stanley research covers to understand their role in this theme.

Are they enabling AI? Are they adopting? Are they disrupted by it? How important is it to the thesis? Do they have pricing power? It’s very valuable data to go and capture the alpha. But I was looking at that dataset recently and a third of those nearly 4,000 companies we cover, our analysts are saying that AI has an impact on the investment thesis. A third. And yet we’re still in the early innings. And so, what may be different, and make the impact much bigger and broader is just the sheer number of corporations that will be impacted by the theme.

Let’s pause here and pick up tomorrow with more on workforce transformation and the impact on individual workers.

Thank you to our listeners. Please join us tomorrow for part two of our conversation. If you enjoy the show, please leave us a review wherever you listen and share Thoughts on the Market with a friend or colleague today.

Before the sun comes up, and before his shift even starts, Devin Samaha is already working up a sweat—scaling the stairs of Chevron’s Houston, Texas, headquarters, sometimes with a sandbag slung over his shoulder.

But for him, this isn’t just a workout. It’s a ritual rooted in his Marine Corps days.

“Exercise is how I stay sharp,” said Samaha, an exploration drilling engineer.

Samaha added that his military service instilled an unwavering sense of integrity, a relentless drive for perfection, and an enthusiastic commitment to any mission, which he brings to every task and opportunity at Chevron.

“The discipline, adaptability and mission-focused leadership I honed in uniform—combined with a deep sense of camaraderie—enable me to build strong, collaborative teams that prioritize safety and deliver projects with precision under pressure,” Samaha said. “The problem-solving skills, resilience and enthusiasm for new challenges forged in high-stress environments drive innovative solutions, foster a supportive workplace culture and ensure the highest standards of safety and excellence.”

CONAKRY, Nov. 12 — China stands ready to build on its long-standing friendship with Guinea, enhance mutual support, and deepen mutually beneficial cooperation between the two countries, Chinese Vice Premier Liu Guozhong has said.

Liu, also a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, made the remarks during a visit to the West African country from Monday to Wednesday at the latter’s invitation. He also attended the inauguration of the Simandou iron ore mine project as President Xi Jinping’s special representative.

During his visit, Liu met with Guinean President Mamadi Doumbouya. The two sides held in-depth discussions on China-Guinea relations and cooperation across various fields.

Conveying Xi’s cordial greetings to Doumbouya, Liu commended Guinea’s progress in economic and social development and extended warm congratulations on the rapid and efficient completion of the Simandou project.

Liu underlined the project as a fruit of nearly 70 years of friendship and cooperation between China and Guinea, as well as between China and Africa, noting that it will play a vital role in advancing Guinea’s economic development and the implementation of its Simandou 2040 strategic plan.

During the Beijing Summit of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) last year, Xi had a successful meeting with Doumbouya, which charted the course for the future development of bilateral relations, said the Chinese vice premier.

Noting that the fourth plenary session of the 20th CPC Central Committee has drawn up a blueprint for China’s development over the next five years, Liu said that China is willing to build on its long-standing friendship with Guinea, enhance mutual support, deepen mutually beneficial cooperation, fully implement the outcomes of the FOCAC Beijing Summit, and join hands to advance modernization.

Doumbouya asked Liu to extend his sincere greetings to Xi.

Guinea views its relations with China from a strategic perspective, cherishes the traditional friendship between the two countries, welcomes more Chinese enterprises to invest in Guinea, and will create favorable conditions for the two sides to expand cooperation across multiple fields, he said.

Doumbouya also expressed Guinea’s willingness to enhance international cooperation with China and work together to safeguard their sovereignty, security, and development interests.

Liu also attended the signing and unveiling ceremony of the China-Africa Joint Medical Center in Guinea.

Keir Starmer has announced that the UK’s first small modular nuclear reactors will be built in north Wales – but immediately faced a backlash from Donald Trump’s administration after it pushed for a US manufacturer to be chosen.

Wylfa on the island of Anglesey, or Ynys Môn, will be home to three small modular reactors (SMRs) to be built by British manufacturer Rolls-Royce SMR. The government said it will invest £2.5bn.

SMRs are a new – and untested – technology aiming to produce nuclear power stations in factories to drive down costs and speed up installation. Rolls-Royce plans to build reactors, each capable of generating 470 megawatts of power, mainly in Derby.

The government also said that its Great British Energy – Nuclear (GBE-N) will report on potential sites for further larger reactors. They would follow the 3.2GW reactors under construction by French state-owned EDF at Hinkley Point C in Somerset and Sizewell C in Suffolk.

The Labour government under Starmer has embraced nuclear energy in the hope that it can generate electricity without carbon dioxide emissions, while also providing the opportunity for a large new export industry in SMRs.

However, it faced the prospect of a row with the US, piqued that its ally had overlooked the US’s Westinghouse Electric Company when choosing the manufacturer for the Wylfa reactors.

Ahead of the publication of the UK announcement, US ambassador Warren Stephens published a statement saying Britain should choose “a different path” in Wales.

“We are extremely disappointed by this decision, not least because there are cheaper, faster and already-approved options to provide clean, safe energy at this same location,” he said.

The Trump administration last month signed an $80bn (£61bn) deal with Westinghouse, which had been struggling financially, to build several of the same larger reactors proposed at Wylfa. Under the terms of that deal, the Trump administration could end up taking a stake in the company.

A source close to the UK government said: “This is the right choice for Britain. This is our flagship SMR programme, producing homegrown clean power with a British company and we have chosen the best site for it.”

While the ambassador’s intervention is unlikely to change the future of Wylfa, it may put pressure on the UK to choose Westinghouse if it does go ahead with future large reactors.

It is understood that Torness, to the east of Edinburgh, and Hunterston, to the west of Glasgow, would be considered for future large reactors. A source close to the energy secretary, Ed Miliband, said the government wants to generate nuclear power in Scotland, despite the opposition of the ruling Scottish National party.

Wylfa generated nuclear power from 1971 until 2015, when its last reactor was shut down. Japan’s Hitachi tried to build a new plant there, but these efforts collapsed in 2019 after it failed to agree funding with the government. GBE-N bought the site from Hitachi.

Starmer said: “Britain was once a world leader in nuclear power, but years of neglect and inertia has meant places like Anglesey have been let down and left behind.

“This government isn’t just reversing decline, it’s delivering thousands of future-proofed jobs, driving billions in investment and providing cheaper energy bills in the long term.”

However, Sharon Graham, general secretary of Unite, said that building three smaller reactors rather than one larger one at Wylfa would be a mistake because it would not maximise the number of jobs for British workers. The union represents some workers in the nuclear industry.

“Failure to support a gigawatt nuclear power station at Wylfa would be a huge missed opportunity in securing the UK’s energy security,” she said.

Nevertheless, the confirmation of a UK site will be another welcome step for Rolls-Royce, the FTSE 100 maker of jet engines that was chosen as the government’s preferred developer in June.

It owns the majority of Rolls-Royce SMR, alongside Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund, France’s BNF Resources, US energy company Constellation, and the Czech utility CEZ, which could order as many as six of the reactors.

Rolls-Royce SMR has more than 1,000 employees, who are racing to produce technology that will also be installed at Temelín in the Czech Republic.

Tom Greatrex, chief executive of the Nuclear Industry Association, a lobby group, said the Wylfa project was “an exciting opportunity for a UK technology, our domestic supply chain and skilled workforce”.

He added: “To achieve the amount of nuclear capacity the country needs for a secure, reliable and price-predictable electricity mix, we will need reactors large and small.

“There will be other projects using different reactor technologies, and potentially further gigawatt-scale plants beyond Sizewell C. Partnership with like-minded allies, including the US, will be a part of delivering that ambition.”

(Bloomberg) — US equity-index futures edged lower and Asian markets opened on a subdued note after a lackluster Wall Street session, as investors stayed cautious with limited economic data clouding the outlook for Federal Reserve policy.

Contracts for the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq 100 index retreated 0.2%, after the underlying gauges were largely unchanged Wednesday. However, Bloomberg’s gauge for the Magnificent Seven fell 1.2%, extending declines for a second straight session. Treasuries steadied in early trading Thursday after yields fell across the curve.

The moves were more pronounced in the commodities market as gold and copper advanced on Fed rate-cut bets. Oil extended its drop after slumping by the most since June as a key market gauge flashed weakness and OPEC said global crude supplies surpassed demand sooner than anticipated.

Investor focus is on the yen after Japanese Finance Minister Satsuki Katayama issued a fresh warning on currency movements. The yen weakened to the key threshold of 155 per dollar on Wednesday, inching closer to levels where authorities last intervened in markets.

With US earnings season nearing completion, markets are shifting focus to the Fed and the outlook for potential interest-rate cuts. The absence of key indicators — such as unemployment figures and October’s consumer price index — has fueled uncertainty around monetary policy, with the White House confirming those reports are unlikely to be released due to the shutdown.

“While the markets are pricing the end of the government shutdown, there is an even bigger mountain ahead of us, and that is the resumption of all of the economic data that we have missed,” said Michael Landsberg at Landsberg Bennett Private Wealth Management. “As the fog lifts, we will see if market positioning has been correct and it is still clear sailing or if there is a big repricing necessary.”

The S&P 500 edged up 0.1%, lifted in part by a 9% surge in Advanced Micro Devices Inc. shares. The Nvidia Corp. rival in AI chips projected accelerating sales growth over the next five years, fueled by robust demand for its data center products. Meanwhile, the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 slipped 0.1%, paring an earlier decline of 0.6%.

There is “probably some profit taking after strong gains on Monday and ahead of Nvidia earnings next week, especially since recent tech earnings have not been enough to satisfy the bulls,” said Sameer Samana, head of global equities and real assets at Wells Fargo Investment Institute. “Also, there’s probably an element of ‘selling the news’ of the shutdown ending.”

Investors are also paying attention to the progress in ending the longest ever US government shutdown.

House Speaker Mike Johnson said he believes the legislation, a hard-fought compromise forged in the Senate and blessed by President Donald Trump, will pass quickly. But he’ll have to keep his fractious party in line in the face of stiff opposition from House Democrats whose leaders are urging them to vote against the legislation.

With the government shutdown delaying key economic data, the real challenge isn’t the short-term drag on growth — it’s the increasing difficulty for investors and the Fed to gauge the economic outlook, noted Seema Shah at Principal Asset Management.

“As data releases resume, the case for a Fed rate cut in December should re-emerge, reinforcing a risk-on backdrop,” she said. “This environment favors US equities, particularly big tech and cyclicals poised to benefit from a more accommodative Fed stance.”

Still, Boston Fed President Susan Collins said she favored holding rates steady amid still-strong growth that could slow or stall progress on cooling inflation.

Treasuries rallied Wednesday, with the 10-year yield closing five basis points lower at 4.07%, fueled by expectations the Fed will cut interest rates in December. Bond traders were also piling into Treasury options, targeting a drop in the 10-year yield below 4% in coming weeks.

Corporate News:

Cisco Systems Inc. shares gained in late trading after the network-equipment giant boosted its 2026 forecast, showing progress in its effort to capture more artificial intelligence spending. Toyota Motor Corp. confirmed it will plow as much as $10 billion into the US over the next five years to boost its local operations. Anthropic PBC plans to spend $50 billion to build custom data centers for artificial intelligence work in several US locations, including Texas and New York, the latest expensive pledge for infrastructure to support the AI boom. Volkswagen AG and Rivian Automotive Inc. have ambitions of selling the electric vehicle technology they’re developing together to other carmakers in the future. Some of the main moves in markets:

Stocks

S&P 500 futures fell 0.1% as of 9:26 a.m. Tokyo time Hang Seng futures fell 0.3% Japan’s Topix rose 0.6% Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 fell 0.2% Euro Stoxx 50 futures rose 0.1% Currencies

The Bloomberg Dollar Spot Index was little changed The euro was little changed at $1.1589 The Japanese yen was little changed at 154.77 per dollar The offshore yuan was little changed at 7.1116 per dollar The Australian dollar was little changed at $0.6535 Cryptocurrencies

Bitcoin fell 0.4% to $101,494.07 Ether fell 0.5% to $3,406.57 Bonds

The yield on 10-year Treasuries advanced one basis point to 4.08% Japan’s 10-year yield was unchanged at 1.685% Australia’s 10-year yield declined one basis point to 4.37% Commodities

West Texas Intermediate crude fell 0.3% to $58.31 a barrel Spot gold was little changed This story was produced with the assistance of Bloomberg Automation.

©2025 Bloomberg L.P.

The bank now expects annual net income of
18 billion t
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21 billion reais ($3.33 billion-$3.89 billion), down from a previous forecast of 21-25 billion reais.

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In the third quarter, the bank’s agribusiness default ratio hit 5.34%, up from 3.49% in the prior three-month period and above its overall 90-day default ratio of 4.93%, which rose 72 basis points sequentially.

“Given this scenario, we have acted with transparency and implemented effective measures to address the situation, responding quickly and decisively,” the bank said in its earnings report.

Banco do Brasil posted an adjusted net profit of 3.79 billion reais ($701.35 million) for the third quarter, down 60.2% from a year earlier but slightly above the 3.71 billion reais expected by analysts polled by LSEG.

The lender’s return on equity, a gauge of profitability, was down 1,276 basis points year-on-year to 8.4%, but unchanged quarter-over-quarter.

In another revision, Banco do Brasil also raised its estimate for cost of credit in 2025 to a range between 59 billion and 62 billion reais, from the 53 billion to 56 billion reais forecast before.

($1 = 5.4039 reais)

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