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AI vs. Me: The Battle for Research Supremacy 

By: John Kim, Assistant Professor of Finance

Once upon a time, I thought my ability to code and analyze CEO behavior gave me a competitive edge as a finance researcher. Enter AI, and suddenly, my hard-earned skills feel… well, a little less special. So, what do you do when the robots catch up? You fight back, of course. 

Back in my PhD days, I spent an absurd amount of time manually collecting data for my research on narcissistic CEOs. There wasn’t a handy dataset back then, so I had to get creative. Armed with Python and some Linux know-how (and a lot of caffeine), I trawled through earnings call transcripts, analyzing how often CEOs said “I” versus “we”—a key measure of narcissism. It was a massive project—10 years, 1,500 companies, and four transcripts per quarter. You do the math. It was brutal. 

Fast forward to today, and guess what? AI can now do the heavy lifting for you. Just ask ChatGPT to count the “I’s” and “we’s” in those transcripts, and bam—what took me months (years?) is now possible in minutes.  

Still, I’m not giving up just yet. I’ve been meaning to extend my dataset for a while but kept putting it off. With AI, maybe it’s time to dust off that project. Here’s my plan: 

1. Can AI find the transcripts, figure out who’s speaking, and do the count—without any help from me? 

1. If that fails, can it at least do the job if I hand over the transcripts? 

1. If that fails… I win! 

1. If it passes, can AI take things further with sentiment analysis or even tone detection? 

And why stop there? What about analyzing the audio of these calls for things like mood, scripted responses, or nervous fumbling? Or even video analysis—can it detect body language? 

Here’s another fun thought: could AI guess someone’s MBTI just from their speech patterns? The possibilities are wild. 

I’ll keep you all posted on my findings. In the meantime, I’d love to hear how you’re testing AI’s limits—or just using it to make life a little easier. Let’s not let the machines have all the fun!