Carlyle's co-president says AI’s improvements to workflow will be felt in months, not years

“We have this great tool out there called AI, and we haven’t 100% figured out how to implement it yet,” says Mark Jenkins, co-president and head of global credit & insurance at Carlyle, on the latest edition of ‘Credit Exchange with Lisa Lee’. Jenkins predicts that the next stage is going to be how corporates implement AI into their workflows, and that the process is “really in the first innings of implement”.

OpenAI, Anthropic, and many others are developing tools for workflow, and Jenkins predicts they will take “not years, but several months” to impact systems. Carlyle, for example, is already using AI to help its investment group be more efficient, and to consume massive amounts of data in ways that would be difficult without AI, says Jenkins. But one has to use AI appropriately, he adds. “It’s not going to make the decision for you.”

While change has been a constant feature during Jenkins’ 35-year career, nothing has been like AI in the past three years. Embrace the change and incorporate it into what you do, because typically, those are the ones that prosper, he counsels.

On the broader investing climate, Jenkins is positive about the macroeconomic environment for the next 12 months. But moving out to 2027 and 2028, inflation may rear its head again.