HSBC is urging investors to look beyond today’s AI headlines, saying that the biggest winners of the artificial intelligence boom may not even exist yet.
In a new CNBC interview, Joe Rasco, HSBC’s Chief Investment Officer for the Americas, pushes back against the idea that the AI buildout is about convenience tools or short-term hype.
Instead, he says the current moment is the early infrastructure phase of a multi-year technological revolution that will ultimately reshape productivity, jobs and corporate profits.
“If we’re going to spend trillions building data centers so I can write term papers more quickly, we just wasted a lot of money. That’s not what AI is. AI is a productivity-enhancing tool on both sides of the balance sheet. LLM models were the entry. They were that entry point. It’s like plugging the computer into the phone line. That was not what the Internet was about.”
Rasco believes that large language models are only the gateway, not the destination. The real transformation, he says, will come from newer forms of AI that fundamentally change how businesses operate.
“The stocks that are going to be the AI winners, we haven’t even produced those companies yet. If you look at empathetic AI, look at agentic AI, look at what that’s doing to both sides of the balance sheet, it is going to be revolutionary and well worth the expenditure.”
While acknowledging the risk of overbuilding, Rasco says the risk does not invalidate the long-term payoff. He compares the current AI cycle to past technological shifts where early fears masked deeper structural gains.
“On the margin, you’ll probably see some of that in three to five years, no question. But the overall spend, well worth it, going to lift productivity.”
Rasco points to the last major tech cycle as a guide for what comes next. While automation and e-commerce wiped out hundreds of thousands of retail jobs, they ultimately created far more roles in other areas, many of them higher-paying and more productive.
“We added more than a million in logistics, distribution, warehousing, and real estate. [These were] higher value-added, higher-paying jobs, and they push multiples higher. So I think that the key here is that we have
to be patient.”
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