Ken Griffin says Citadel AI agents finish PhD tasks in days

Ken Griffin went home on a Friday "fairly depressed" after watching AI agents at Citadel do work that used to take teams of PhDs in finance months to complete. Done in days. His words: "These are not mid-tier white collar jobs. These are extraordinarily high skilled jobs being automated by agentic AI." This is the head of one of the most successful hedge funds in history saying the people he pays seven figures to analyze markets and structure deals are being replaced by software that works in hours instead of months. Not theoretically. In his own office. Right now. The Coatue deck we covered earlier this week called agents "the biggest unlock" in AI. Griffin just confirmed it from the buy side. The shift from copilots to agents is not a future event. It is already happening at the highest levels of finance.