Artificial Intelligence: How tech tools are changing work, school, and the stock market

Thank you so much for joining us today.

Thanks for having me.

There has been some volatility in top AI stocks.

The Wall Street Journal, your publication, reports about 8 to 10% of government pension funds are invested in a basket of publicly traded AI-related companies.

Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Amazon spent $130 billion in the first quarter of 2026.

Based on that spending, AI-related investments could go as high as $725 billion for the year as a whole.

Justin, what has caused the recent volatility in the AI stocks, and where do you think we stand with AI as an investment?

Yeah, when I think about the volatility, there's always so many things going on.

One thing about these, you know, the so-called hyperscalers, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, and so forth, they have substantial capital investment needs.

Analysts expect them to invest something like $4 trillion over the next four years.

That's a lot of money.

They're going to have to raise money to be able to pay for all that.

A lot of that will come through the bond market with a lot of uncertainty on where rates are.

That causes some concern on its own.

And then you're just looking at an enormous amount of money.

You know, what's the payoff going to be? The other thing about AI is the payoff isn't going to come tomorrow.

The payoff is going to come a long, long time from now, right? Four, five, six, seven years out.

It's a long-term investment.

Long-term investments like that are very, very sensitive to interest rates.

So again, we have sort of concerns about what is the rate situation going to be? What's inflation going to look like? It can really, really affect those kinds of companies.

So just that can create a lot of volatility within these, you know, very, very big, very important to people's retirement fund stocks.

Because if interest rates continue going up, their borrowing costs and investment costs are also going to go up.

Right.

Exactly.

Yeah.