Hedge-fund manager Brian Kelly has his staff working 24/7, yet his payroll costs are a fraction of what they once were.
That’s because Kelly — who previously ran a cryptocurrency hedge fund — created his new trading firm, Bracket22, to be powered entirely by agentic artificial intelligence.
“I used to have about seven or eight employees all around the world. A lot of them were based in New York,” Kelly told CNBC. “Between their salaries and compute and healthcare and everything like that, my payroll was well into the millions of dollars per year.”
Factoring in things such as office space and bonuses, Kelly estimated his total labor-related costs before he began using AI were roughly $5 million a year.
“Now, when I’m using AI, I run somewhere around [$30,000] to $40,000 a year, total. And that’s with every AI agent, that’s with all my compute, that’s with everything I need to completely replicate a hedge fund … with AI,” he said….
