Wall Street Still Runs on Spreadsheets. AI Is About to Change That — Joshua Pantony Boosted AI

Joshua Pantony spent years being told there would never be a viable AI company in his lifetime. He sold his first AI company to Microsoft anyway — work that quietly became part of what is now Microsoft Copilot. Today he runs Boosted AI, an agentic platform serving more than 400 institutional investors who collectively manage around five trillion dollars in assets. He is one of the most credible voices in applied AI finance, and his read on where the industry is heading cuts through a lot of noise.

The conversation covers what it actually means to deploy AI in professional investing — not the demo version, but the one that has to earn trust from portfolio managers who have built careers on discretion and judgment. The platform learns each investor's individual style and then acts like a highly motivated junior analyst who never sleeps: constantly surfacing ideas, flagging risks, and improving the workflow without ever taking over the decision.

Josh also unpacks why the Bloomberg terminal is facing its BlackBerry moment, why the technology moat is effectively dead, and why the next durable advantage in finance will come from human trust networks that no model can replicate. Ted Schilowitz and Rony Abovitz join host Charlie Fink with sharp frames throughout — Rony's observation that the innovator's dilemma is now a high-frequency problem landed hard.

AI XR News You Should Know: The episode opens with two news segments covering AWE 2026 and the Snap Spectacles keynote with Evan Spiegel, the Samsung Galaxy Glasses debut, Gemini rolling out as Android's native agentic AI, the Cerebras sixty-billion-dollar IPO, and what an AI filmmaking company launched by the creators of Instagram Stories tells us about the future of short-form content. The conversation about micro-dramas, why Quibi failed, and what sixty percent of social media users now say about their own feeds leads directly into the trust themes that run through the entire episode.

Key Moments:

[00:00] – Cold open and welcome. Charlie frames the sixth anniversary of the show.[02:30] – AWE 2026 recap. Snap Spectacles keynote, Evan Spiegel on stage, Samsung Galaxy Glasses previewed.[06:00] – Gemini as Android's native agentic layer. What it means that AI is now replacing the OS interface.[09:15] – Cerebras sixty-billion-dollar IPO. What a big AI IPO year signals for the sector.[12:00] – AI filmmaking and Instagram Stories creators. The new short-form production economy.[14:30] – Why Quibi really failed. No sharing mechanic, wrong bet on clipping, and arriving before the audience was ready.[16:45] – The trust problem in social feeds. YouGov data: sixty percent of users cannot tell what is real. Social becoming a lie stream.[19:00] – Guest intro. Joshua Pantony on being told AI would never be a viable business, and the algorithm he wrote at twenty that saved a million dollars.[24:00] – How Boosted AI works. The digital twin model, the agentic workflow, and why it is not a portfolio manager.[33:00] – The Bloomberg terminal's BlackBerry moment. Thirty thousand dollars a year for what AI will deliver for a fraction.[42:00] – The moat is dead. Why user context — not the technology — is the durable advantage.[51:00] – The innovator's dilemma at high frequency. Rony on why a day in AI is like a decade, and what that means for incumbents.[58:00] – Trust networks as the last edge. The analog handshake as the most valuable currency in a world of synthetic information.

This conversation is a clear-eyed look at what it takes to build AI that professionals actually adopt — not a pitch, not a thought experiment. Josh's framing of Wall Street as the greatest collective intelligence humanity has built, and his argument that AI can finally make capital allocation genuinely more efficient, gives the episode an ambition that goes well beyond fintech.

The question of what survives automation — and what only humans can do — runs underneath every answer.

This episode is sponsored by Zappar and Mattercraft. Mattercraft is Zappar's browser-based augmented reality creation platform — build and deploy WebAR experiences without an app, at mattercraft.io.

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