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The future is moving faster than you think: Innovation’s role in reshaping investments

The future is moving faster than you think: Innovation’s role in reshaping investments

The Private Wealth Sessions at HSBC’s Global Investment Summit, held on 27 March 2025, attracted more than 600 attendees, offering individual investors, entrepreneurs and senior executives exclusive insights from globally influential and visionary experts, investment leaders and innovators.

Technology – a core focus throughout – is rapidly transforming global markets and industries, presenting investors with challenges and exceptional opportunities. In this second insight article from the event, we feature views from our speakers on which alpha-generating opportunities are being accelerated by disruptive tech.

"Change is coming and a lot of it will be fantastic," said Stephen A. Schwarzman, Chairman, CEO and Co-Founder of Blackstone, during the opening conversation at the HSBC Global Investment Summit: The Private Wealth Sessions. 

Highlighting the transformative potential of artificial intelligence, Mr. Schwarzman said further advances with AI were close and would profoundly affect the world’s industries – a significant theme throughout the day’s sessions. 

According to Cathie Wood, Founder, CEO and CIO of ARK Invest, AI is accelerating the convergence of major innovation platforms, including robotics, energy storage, and multi-omic sequencing — a comprehensive analysis of multiple types of biological data from a single sample. “The most profound application of AI, without doubt in our mind, is healthcare, according to our research,” she said, adding that the technology could bring down the cost of bringing new drugs to market from an average of USD2.4 billion to USD600 million because of fewer trial failures. 

Ms. Wood also highlighted the investment opportunity with autonomous taxis, which she said could scale to a USD8-10 trillion market within the next 5-10 years.

“We have not been at a time like this since the late 1800s or early 1900s when telephones, electricity, and the internal combustion engine transformed the world,” she said. 

Ms Wood’s fellow panellist, Bob Smith, Principal at Right Hand Side Consulting Group and Former Chief Executive Officer at space technology firm Blue Origin, pointed out the challenge that humanity has with extrapolating AI’s impact because its potential applications are exponential, not linear. “The biggest challenge with AI is not necessarily trying to grow more AI or more capable AI. It's actually how to build use cases from the technology we have right now,” he said.

Turning money into time

Drilling down to those use cases in another session, Dr Alex Zhavoronkov, Founder and CEO of Insilico Medicine, said AI’s “major impact in healthcare is going to be in drug discovery.” 

AI could enable faster preclinical drug discovery and development, thereby reducing time and cost, and leading to fewer pipeline failures and greater commercialisation of medicines. Dr Zhavoronokov argued that people have always been able to turn time into money, but that AI held the potential for us to convert money into time. “That's where AI will have the most impact, on your lifespan,” he said. 

Dr Amit Kakar, Managing Partner and Head of Asia at Novo Holdings, stressed AI’s “multimodal” capacity. AI can collate and analyse vast amounts of patient data from multiple sources, such as imaging, genomics, pathology, and medication. Dr Kakar explained that most medical data goes into silos and remains unused. However, AI can transform this and ultimately reduce redundant medical tests, provide more thorough diagnoses and enable more personalised and precise medical interventions.

“I think that's where we see AI heading,” he said, “and I'm saying that this is not going to happen 20 years from now. It's actually the next 4-5 years.”

Venture funding for digital health firms increased by 5.5 per cent year-on-year to USD25.1 billion in 2024, according to Galen Health, with AI ventures capturing 58 per cent of that amount.1 In public markets, AI standard-bearer Nvidia rose by 171 per cent last year, but has stalled so far in 2025.2

Dr Ayesha Khanna, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder at Addo AI, said investors should think more broadly about AI opportunities. “Nvidia is not the only player,” she said. “It's a dominant player at the moment, but we're going to see them AI chips from Google. We're going to see them from other players. And there are different kinds of chips, like Saudi Arabia just invested in USD1.5 billion to bring Groq chips to Saudi Arabia, which are for inference.”3

Hype and value

Still, with all the excitement comes caution. Investors must distinguish between hype and true value creation. Traditional valuation models are being upended as intangible assets like data, algorithms, and network effects become central to company worth. For forward-looking investors, success will depend not only on spotting trends but on understanding how technological shifts change business fundamentals.

One area of value that Mr Schwarzman pointed out was data centres, which provide the much-needed computing power for many AI applications. Pointing out that Blackstone is “the largest developer of data centres in the world, and also the largest owner of data centres,” he urged investors to think about the electricity required to power these facilities.

Growth in US electricity use has been minimal for the past decade, he said, but the rapid expansion of data centres means electricity consumption should surge, potentially exceeding current supply by 40 per cent. “That provides so many different opportunities,” Mr Schwarzman said, “whether it’s renewables, natural gas, or owning utilities themselves.”

1 https://www.galengrowth.com/ai-and-techbio-funding-lead-the-charge-2024-digital-health-funding-resurgence/  ↩

2 https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nvidia-skyrockets-171-2024-stock-122400412.html ↩

3 https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/ai-chip-startup-groq-secures-15-billion-commitment-saudi-arabia-2025-02-10/  ↩

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