Joseph Plazo just reminded a room full of elite students something Wall Street won’t admit: AI may be efficient, but it lacks wisdom.

MANILA — He didn’t show up to sugarcoat things. He came to drop truth bombs.

On a humid Thursday morning at the prestigious AIM campus in Manila, Plazo stood before a sea of students from top Asian universities—HKUST—ready for a sermon on AI’s glory in finance.

What they got instead? A jolt of truth.

“AI is like your smartest intern,” Plazo noted, “But you still don’t give the intern the keys to your vault.”

The room laughed. Then they grew quiet. Because he wasn’t joking.

### AI’s Blind Spot? Human Nature

Let’s be clear—Plazo isn’t some Luddite clinging to the past. He architects trading AIs. His firm, Plazo Sullivan Roche Capital, powers some of the most accurate systems across global markets. He understands machine learning like few do.

But that’s exactly why his warning cut deep.

“The problem isn’t AI,” he told the room. “It’s what we expect from it. We keep hoping it’ll save us from making hard decisions. That’s a fantasy.”

Plazo unpacked real-world case studies—moments when AI signaled winning trades… right before a central bank pivot or an unexpected war. Noise that shattered the signal.

### Asia’s Best Challenged Him—and Learned Something

A student from Kyoto asked if LLMs might someday gauge global sentiment.

Plazo answered without blinking.

“AI can spot a tweetstorm. But it won’t sense dread in a press conference. It won’t catch regret in a central banker’s sigh.”

The room exhaled. That one stuck.

Another asked, “Can AI ever understand conviction?”

Plazo raised an eyebrow.

“Conviction isn’t math. It’s instinct. It’s shaped by failure and memory. You don’t download that.”

### A Wake-Up Call for Tomorrow’s Titans

This wasn’t about flash trading or chatbots. It was about principle.

Students admitted they saw AI as a cheat code—an escape hatch from risk, from thinking too hard. Plazo tore that idea down.

“You can automate your trades. You can’t automate your values.”

That line echoed. Because everyone in that room—from the copyright cowboys to the quant whizzes—wanted alpha. But not at the cost of why they started.

### So What’s AI Good For?

Plazo didn’t trash AI. He credited its strengths:

- It filters noise.
- It backtests at scale.
- It spots technical setups better than any human.

But it can’t read sarcasm. It fails to sense when a click here politician is bluffing. And it doesn’t know if your retirement burns.

“If your AI bot makes a bad call,” Plazo asked, “do you still own it? Or do you blame the code?”

That’s when the silence hit.

### Trading is Human—AI is Just the Tool

Plazo wasn’t preaching finance. He was preaching maturity. Use AI—but don’t worship it. Let it assist—not decide.

And yes—he still believes in the machines. He’s building tools that track geopolitics, misinformation, even psychological nuance.

But he left no doubt:

“No machine can tell you when *not* to act. That’s your job.”

### In a World of Signals, Be the Noise You Trust

As the crowd filed out—buzzing, challenged, changed—one phrase echoed down the halls:

“AI doesn’t know your values. So don’t let it make your decisions.”

In a world chasing speed, Plazo offered something rarer:

A choice.

Because investing isn’t just about *winning*. It’s about knowing **why** you played.