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In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · 3 min · Oct 28, 2026
AI will commoditize intelligence and expand entrepreneurship
Bill Ackman
Bill Ackman says AI speeds up short-term market analysis and forces investors to assess how it affects every business.
The episode’s best minutes
Full analysis- 41:04AI could help restore lost brain function3 min
- 13:41AI will commoditize intelligence and expand entrepreneurship3 min
- 32:43Engagement-driven social media can deepen divisionPro pick 5 min
- 3 more moments in the full episode
“every business today is either AI related or should be, or is going to be disrupted by AI.”
Bill Ackmanat 14:20 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen
Takeaways
- AI can read filings instantly, intensifying the search for short-term edges.
- Ackman bought Amazon, Meta and Microsoft after negative market reactions.
- He expects cheaper intelligence to fuel entrepreneurship and growth.
About this segment
Bill Ackman says AI speeds up short-term market analysis and forces investors to assess how it affects every business. He expects cheap intelligence to spur entrepreneurship, with creativity a possible human advantage.
Bill Ackman is founder and CEO of Pershing Square.
Founded and runs Pershing Square, an activist investment firm; executive chairman of Howard Hughes Holdings.
Nicolai Tangen, Host · CEO, Norges Bank Investment Management
From “Bill Ackman: Is Permanent Capital an Investor’s Biggest Edge? | Podcast | In Good Company”, Oct 28, 2026. Watch the full episode
Answers “What will AI look like in the next few years?” See all 169 answers
Thanks. We'll look at and fix what's off.
Transcript
Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.
- 13:46
been an amazing competitor, if you will, the index. Yeah. Now, what is AI doing to the market? I think it's making market participants increasingly shorter and shorter term. You know, you can, a 10K gets published and AI can read it instantly. There's a huge amount of capital invested in looking for a short-term edge. And AI, I think, enables that. The type of investments you have which are AI related would be, I mean, you've got AWS.
- 14:20
Anything else? So, you know, Meta is a big investor in, well, I would say every business today is either AI related or should be, or is going to be disrupted by AI. So I think that's the assessment that you have to do. You know, we own, we purchased Amazon after Trump announced the Liberation Day tariffs. We acquired Meta after they disappointed people by committing a large amount of money to CapEx.
- 14:44
And the same with Microsoft. It's sort of an interesting environment when you have a company come out publicly and say, we have enormous demand for our service, therefore we have to invest well in excess of what we expected in CapEx just to try to meet the demand from our product and then stock price goes down. And that's what led to an investment in Microsoft. But it's probably those names represent about a third of our portfolio today.
- 15:09
What is AI going to do to the world? Uh, it's going to give almost everyone, uh, access to very low cost, uh, very high intelligence. Um, so it's, if you think about, you know, if, if intelligence is a competitive advantage in the world, and we think that it is, and then intelligence becomes a commodity, uh, it's sort of a, it's, it's a very interesting, um, um, interesting to think about what the implications are. I sort of make the argument that what's left when everyone has access to low-cost superintelligence is sort of creativity, right? What LLMs can do is they can read everything they can before and be incredibly knowledgeable about that. But it's not clear to me that AI can be creative yet.
- 16:00
Right. Einstein's light bulb moments, E equals MC squared over theory of relativity, I don't think that anything that came before Einstein that AI would have read would have come out with that formula, if you will. And so I think the space that's left for human beings is, but I do think it could lead to abundance. I think there's going to be an explosion of entrepreneurship uh and um i think there can be an explosion in overall gdp or global growth