firms that translate ai-driven data into clear insight will lead the next era of advisory.
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by rory henry cfp®, bfa™
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few people have been able to bridge the gap between emerging technology and the accounting profession the way dr. sean stein smith does. a cpa, researcher, forbes contributor, and professor at lehman college, stein smith serves on the advisory board of the wall street blockchain alliance and has spent more than a decade helping practitioners make sense of blockchain, crypto, and artificial intelligence.
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“the whole blockchain conversation has moved from the back burner to the front [burner],” he says. “every major financial institution is entering the on-chain space.”
and cpas can no longer afford to ignore it.
stein smith believes the biggest driver of this momentum is the convergence of blockchain and artificial intelligence (ai). blockchain provides transparency and auditability. ai adds speed, analysis, and pattern recognition. together, he said, they are reshaping how information moves across payments, banking, and trading.
“ai has been integrated into every aspect of payments, banking, and trading,” he says. “it is changing how money moves.”
with greater speed comes greater risk, which is why he stresses the need for oversight. “when you increase the speed of payments, fraud detection and oversight have to be part of the equation. the controls have to keep pace with the system,” stein smith adds.
for decades, accountants have been trained to reconcile numbers and produce reports, but ai is shifting that dynamic. clearly, it creates massive volumes of data, “but data by itself is not valuable unless you can translate it into business insight,” stein smith observes, adding that the profession’s competitive edge will increasingly come from interpreting mountains of data for clients, helping them understand what all that data means for them.
the rise of “business skills”
volumes have been written about the need for accountants to develop “soft skills” in addition to technical skills. stein smith prefers the term “business skills” to soft skills. “it is not about being soft,” he says. it’s about “going into a meeting and talking to a client about ai agents, blockchain, and crypto. how do i meet them where they are in terms of how to use these tools?”
he cautions that firms often invest heavily in technology but overlook the training needed to help people use it well. “[ai agents, blockchain and crypto] are powerful tools,” he says. “but if you do not know how to use them, they can do a lot of damage.”
the pros and cons of ai for advisory
advantages
stein smith outlines several benefits that ai brings to cpas when it comes to client advisory work:
• ai can summarize documents, compare contracts, and flag discrepancies extremely quickly.
• it reduces repetitive tasks that staff often find draining.
• it surfaces trends and insights that support client conversations.
• it can help advisors identify tone and client sentiment earlier.
risks
he also highlights risks advisors cannot ignore:
• ai can hallucinate and produce confident, but incorrect answers. practitioners must review ai’s work carefully before sharing it with clients.
• public-facing tools should never receive private client data.
• over-reliance on automation can commoditize advisory work.
• mistakes can scale quickly without human review.
“you have to fact-check,” he says. “there must be human review before anything goes out the door.”
from transactions to transformation
automation is changing what clients expect and what advisory firms can deliver. stein smith explains that ai finally gives firms the ability to automate or augment the routine, low-value tasks that clients do not want to pay for and staff don’t enjoy doing. with those tasks handled by technology, advisors can put more focus on meaningful advisory conversations and long-term outcomes, and enhance their return on relationship (ror) metric.
stein smith credits accounting profession thought leaders like ron baker for advocating the shift from transactional labor to a more strategic model. technology now makes it easier to put baker’s vision into practice.
the psychology of technology
as ai becomes more visible in advisory interactions, advisors must manage not only the tools but also client emotion. stein smith points to the growing influence of online voices that encourage comparison and speculation. “dealing with client fomo is going to be more important,” he says. “there is more information than ever, and it is not all reliable.”
in that environment, professional credibility matters more. “the cpa license still carries weight,” he says, ”because human first expertise and knowledge is going to be more valuable because it is going to be harder and harder for current and future clients to understand what sources of data are actually objective, correct, and able to be used.”
blockchain beyond the headlines
“bitcoin may grab the headlines,” he says, “but the real innovation is happening in enterprise blockchain applications. as more financial institutions adopt these systems, the trust in blockchain data is only going to increase,” stein smith notes.
he points to banks, payment networks, and asset managers already using private blockchains and stablecoins to move money more efficiently and securely.
looking ahead
despite rapid change, stein smith remains pragmatic. “the tools are here,” he says. it’s all about “how we use them responsibly and intelligently.” he believes ai and blockchain will continue to reshape workflows, client expectations, and advisory roles. but he emphasizs that human judgment, ethical boundaries, and strong communication will remain at the center of professional work.
5 advis-ror takeaways
- data is the new asset. firms that translate ai-driven data into clear insight will lead the next era of advisory.
- trust is the differentiator. technology supports the work, but human judgment builds long-term client relationships.
- oversight matters. ai brings speed and efficiency, but without human review, errors can scale quickly.
- blockchain adoption is accelerating. major companies are adopting blockchain technology.
- transformation beats transactions. automation frees advisors to focus on outcomes and the value they can bring to their clients.
more about dr. sean stein smith
dr. sean stein smith is an associate professor at the city university of new york – lehman college. he serves on the advisory board of the wall street blockchain alliance, where he chairs the accounting working group. dr. stein smith also serves as an advisor to crescent city capital, a cryptoasset investment fund, and is also an advisor to hyperion, a crypto accounting startup. dr. stein smith is an award-winning researcher who has been recognized in both the united states and the european union for his contributions to the accounting field. he is a certified cryptocurrency auditor and has completed an executive education program in artificial intelligence at mit. dr. stein smith has developed and presented courses on artificial intelligence, cryptoassets, and blockchain for both the aicpa and ima. he has also delivered presentations and training sessions for the pcaob, the fdic, the aicpa, multiple state accounting societies, and guest lectures at nearly 20 colleges and universities.
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transcript
(transcripts are made available as soon as possible. they are not fully edited for grammar or spelling.)
rory henry: all right. hello, everyone. i’m excited to welcome back our guest today, who’s joining me for a third time. he’s an internationally recognized voice, a forbes contributor, cpa, researcher, and author. he serves on the advisory board of the wall street blockchain alliance and is a professor at lehman college. he’s helping practitioners and really the general public make sense of emerging technologies like crypto, blockchain, and ai. without further ado, let me welcome my friend, dr. sean stein smith. sean, welcome to the show.
[00:01:14] dr sean stein smith: thank you so much, rory.
[00:01:16] rory henry: yes, buddy.
[00:01:16] dr sean stein smith: good to be here.
[00:01:17] rory henry: yeah, i’m glad to have you on. i know we have a lot to talk about. i know when we were speaking, you want to talk about ai and advisory, but i want to have you give our audience a little bit of base here because there’s a convergence going on. you are sitting on the front lines here of blockchain and ai. you wrote a book on blockchain, ai, and financial services, so can you talk about this convergence and how they complement each other?
[00:01:41] dr sean stein smith: yeah, sure thing. probably the two big things that i’ve been following most of all, rory, is that one, the whole blockchain conversation has really moved off the back burner and onto the front burner during the last two, three, four, five years. now pretty much every major trad-fi firm out there, be it banks, asset managers, plan managers, wealth advisory firms, are entering into this on-chain space via products and services from big household names like chase. we have blackrock. obviously, we have sofi. blackrock now is actually re-instituting their option for consumers to then trade pairs, bitcoin dollars, ether dollars, and then also ai is this huge force out here. ai burst into the mainstream conversation back at the end of 2022, and it really has been just going nonstop ever since. ai has been integrated into every aspect of payments, banking, trading, wealth management, and it is really changing every aspect of the banking, finance, and anything to do with having money is being influenced by ai. there are some pros and cons there too, but ultimately, what i would say there, rory, is that the true promise of blockchain and on-chain payments is instantaneous payments. they’re traceable, transparent, they cost less, they’re just better, faster, cheaper. in order for that promise to actually become reality, ai is going to play a major part in that to make sure that the analytics are there, that the processing is there, and that the anti-fraud efforts are actually able to keep pace alongside blockchain and on-chain payments. it’s always interesting to be here, and i know that depending on the day and the audience, the term front lines is more or something less accurate, but it’s always exciting.
[00:03:52] rory henry: yeah, yeah. well, i mean, the blockchain is that trust and transparency, and then the ai drives speed and efficiency. i know you’ve talked about data is really the new asset here. traditionally, for folks that are accountants or in the accounting space, they’re trained on measuring numbers, reconciling books, producing reports, but we’re seeing this shift because data is like gold, where we can analyze it, leverage it, and be able to provide insights and use that to improve the value of our clients’ businesses, and their personal financial planning, and all the things that come in with financial services.
[00:04:30] dr sean stein smith: yes, i mean, the true oil that’s powering any number of these applications, be they at larger institutions or ai-native, crypto-native firms, is having access to high-quality, trustworthy information. for anybody who is in my world as a cpa, is having to reorient themselves as to how this huge influx of data, because ai creates data nonstop. there’s huge volumes of data, and all of that has to be analyzed, and more importantly, rory, it has to be parsed into terms that entrepreneurs, that our clients can actually use, because data is great, but by itself, if i can’t translate that into terms that my clients can understand, then it’s not as useful as it otherwise might be.
[00:05:29] rory henry: yeah. i just heard you, i was doing some research here, you had kevin mattson, the president of the nyscpa, and he talked about really the importance of multidisciplinary skills, blending those hard skills with the soft skills. i think that’s what we’re talking about, being able to communicate effectively. i talk about this in the human-first approach, behavioral finance, and really understanding the human behind the numbers. can you really talk about that importance? let’s talk about those soft skills and being able to communicate effectively with our clients. absolutely. and our colleagues, right?
[00:06:01] dr sean stein smith: yes, hopefully, right? yeah. i’m going to push back just a tiny bit there, rory, that the term soft skills, i don’t really like that term. i don’t either. i know that i was actually educated last week by a colleague of mine that the phrase soft and hard skills comes from the military. but for our audience here- well, soft skills are hard, hard skills are soft. exactly. but it isn’t so much soft skills, it’s honestly business skills, right? how do i go into a meeting, talk to a client, and basically walk them through how all of these great tools, be it ai agents, be it blockchain, be it crypto, how do i talk to them? how do i meet them where they are in terms of how to use these tools? because everybody at this point, our audience, understands kind of sort of what the blockchain is, what bitcoin is, and how ai works. but then, okay, how do we take that to the enterprise level? how do we actually take these tools, which are incredibly powerful tools, but powerful tools, if you don’t know how to use them correctly, can do a lot of damage, they can make a lot of mess. so, how do we understand how the tools work, talk to our clients in a language and in a manner that helps them, and then three, integrate it into their businesses as they currently are? then ultimately, have them harness those tools to make them, to allow them to make better business choices. and that’s super important, because it’s awfully easy to be lost in sort of the, one, the headlines, and two, all of the terminology, right, around ai. we have large language models, we have natural language processing, we have machine learning engines, we have blockchain, we have private blockchains, public blockchains, we have defi, we have staking, we have all kinds of terminology out there. so how do you figure out, on our end, which terms, topics, and themes are actually most important? and then hone in on those, and then actually figure out, out of this whole ecosystem, which tools and topics are actually going to be useful today for our clients to want to get educated on, and to integrate them into their business. and that’s really the sort of point at which the whole accounting finance ecosystem is at. that the tools are here, we are using them, but then how do we make sure that as we use them, we are using them to maximize them, both internally, hopefully, and externally.
[00:08:44] rory henry: yeah. well, let’s speak about how we can utilize these tools. you know, i know you talked about ai advisory, and you have pros and cons. so if people are kind of approaching this advisor world, and, you know, moving on, we talked about compliance, and to advise your role, to advise your roles here, let’s talk about some pros and cons on how people can be approaching this, you know, in a methodical and authentic way.
[00:09:11] dr sean stein smith: i think the best sort of parallel here is to highlight that any of these tools, right, be it ai, right? ai is sort of our, our sort of point right here, and ai, how do we actually integrate it? well, ai in and of itself is not any different from a institutional level, as opposed to any other tool, right? meaning how do we figure out which tool works for us, right? how do we vet the external vendor to partner with? how do we integrate it into our firms? and then how do we do so in a way that isn’t accidentally changing our risk profile? so then the, so, and so then adding on to that, the pros and cons, right? ai, it is easy to use, it’s intuitive, and it gives you, on the surface, entirely accurate answers that are, that are well-reasoned, comprehensive, and all the rest. but there have been multiple cases. i know, i know there was a big four firm, which i won’t name here, that was, that was recently in some hot water, right, right, because of some content produced by the firm that turns out to be have, that turns out that was entirely produced by ai, and had not been fact-checked. and so the pros are that it’s easy to use, it’s intuitive, i can save time on, you know, document analytics, doing engagement letters, doing analytics inside the firm for our purposes, and externally. i can analyze data for clients and map out two, three, four, five, 12 different options for them instantaneously. now on the exact opposite side of all of those attributes are the risks, right? that one, and i cannot highlight this enough, rory, you cannot put client data into a, into a public-facing large language model. now, if your firm has their own in-house model, if your client has their own ai agent built out, that’s fine. or even copilot has those enterprise options that are available to you to help, to help keep data safe. but you cannot put confidential data, personal data into these models. and then two, you aren’t able to blindly trust any ai output. all of us i’m sure have, have heard the term black box, right, via automation, be it, you know, data analytics, business intelligence, other areas like that, that i can’t just input the ai into my current process and just, you know, kind of trust it, right? you do that. there has to be a opportunity for human oversight, be it fact checking, be it just you going over the output to make sure that as it’s going out the door to your clients, that it’s answering the questions that actually were asked and that hopefully it’s accurate. and so there is that, you know, con side too, that if we all trust ai and, you know, obviously trusting ai brings up images of the matrix, the terminator, but if we’re trusting ai, right, and pretty much everybody is trusting it more and more, how does that change how our clients perceive us? if all of our sort of baseline tasks be doing analytics, doing modeling, doing option, option planning for them, if ai is doing more and more of that, and all of us are doing that, that turns those services into a commodity. and so then what happens to a industry as it becomes a commodity, margins go down. so then how do we deal with that? and that goes back to that business aspect of it, dealing with clients, talking to clients, and then being able to be that point of contact to add that value in terms of translating this ai output into actionable business insights. and i do think the pros and cons go hand in hand, and right now, you know, there is sort of a adjustment period underway in terms of how best to address that.
[00:13:26] rory henry: yeah, i mean, we’ve gone obviously from a profession on the accounting side, where we build because of transactions, and as ron baker talks, and i champion wells, we’re moving to ones of transformation, and ai and blockchain is allowing us to do that, to provide transformations for our business owner clients, for the personal financial planning clients, that is going to be that’s going to set us apart from the commoditized work that’s going on because of technology. so you’re right, it is a mindset shift for folks out there, to be able to really provide value and outcomes that are meaningful for clients.
[00:14:05] dr sean stein smith: yeah. and, you know, this whole idea of the billable hour, right? and i think of that because you mentioned ron baker, who for decades has been out there saying that we as cpas have to, you know, pivot away from the billable hour to more of a value based building model. and all of that, all that on paper, always sounded good. and now, and now, we actually have the tools to do so, to automate or to augment those base level tasks that one, aren’t billable, that two, aren’t interesting for our staff to do internally. and three, our clients don’t want to pay for or even hear about. and so then now we have, have the tools that, that all of us have been sort of on the hunt for that allow us to become that trusted business advisor, as opposed to always being the compliance people backwards looking focus. yeah.
[00:15:04] rory henry: and look, we’re, they’re seeing tools out there, ai meeting tools that are really understanding the sentiment. so when you’re able to be able to aggregate all the data, business side, personal financial planning side, and then listen to those client conversations, you’re really able to mind not only the hard financial debts and credits, right, but also where people are at emotionally and psychologically. so we talk about behavioral finance and our human first approach, the ai is going to be able to analyze all those, all those pieces of information, as well as the sentiment of that client. and you’ll be able to then provide, you know, personalized and impactful advice to them.
[00:15:44] dr sean stein smith: yes. and what i would add there is that, you know, that ability to do analytics on the, on the sentiment or on the words that aren’t said during meetings or during conversations is going to become even more important. and i really highlight that fact to be because right now there’s more information, more advice out there than ever previously. there’s tiktok, there’s reddit, there’s instagram, all of these people advocate, no advocating for certain investments for, i won’t name names here, but there are certain plans, investments and gurus out there that have this information. and so i do think that dealing with client fomo is going to be more and more important because even if they aren’t telling us directly, if they’re doing things or they are coming to us with certain ideas, then it’s up to us to be able to analyze those, understand them and to help our clients be navigated towards a more productive ideas. right.
[00:16:52] rory henry: that’s the psychological battleground we’re on, right? we’re up against social media influencers. you know, that’s why it’s the importance of our credentials, of being a fiduciary, right? being a cpa and that, and that trusted advisor. so people can, you know, go to you and, and, and trust that you’re able to, to provide them sound, sound advice.
[00:17:10] dr sean stein smith: yes. and i do know that the whole conversation around the value of the cpa license has been going on for a while. there’s the one 20 and the one 50 and all that. and you know, that’s a whole other conversation, right? but ultimately i do think that the gold sort of gold standard of being a cpa is that anybody, be it a client, be it a person on the street understands what that means in, in, in terms of your expertise, how you analyze things, and then how you try to help a businesses do better. and i do think more and more as there’s more people out there talking, being a source of objective, reasonable business first, human first expertise and knowledge is going to be more valuable because it is going to be a harder and harder for the average person that beat our current clients or clients in the future, or our employees to understand what sources of data are actually objective, correct, and able to be used.
[00:18:14] rory henry: yeah. and what’s truth, right? exactly. in this wild world we’re in, well, i know bitcoin gets a lot of attention and you recently talked about the legislation that was passed and bitcoin obviously gets a lot of the headlines, but you argue that blockchain functionality is the real story here. can you kind of expand on that?
[00:18:39] dr sean stein smith: yeah, sure thing. so obviously bitcoin, it’s the headliner, right? it’s the og crypto. it’s been the headliner forever. but in terms of actually being used by enterprises and clients, the real upshot is now we have better blockchains. we have more blockchains and we have blockchains that have the institutional backstops and institutional safeguards that our clients want and ultimately need. that if i have a client who comes to me and wants to put some of their business on chain or have payments come to them on chain, they probably aren’t going to want to use the bitcoin blockchain or the ethereum blockchain. and that as blockchains get better integrated into existing software tools and existing asset management- like jp morgan, i think you said, jp morgan has their own blockchain, right?
[00:19:34] rory henry: and they’re doing payments.
[00:19:36] dr sean stein smith: jp morgan has had their own chain and they’ve had it named, i think- onyx, right? it had been onyx, then it had some other name and it has some third name now. so they’re constantly changing their internal name, right? but yeah, even chase, who’s ceo, jamie dimon, famously hates bitcoin. but his bank, his institution has been actively building out their own in-house blockchain, their private blockchain. and they even have now their own, i believe they call it the jpm demand deposit token, basically their own stable coin to help them better process payments internally in between clients. and so as that happens, the upshot there is that trust in blockchain data is only going to increase. and that with trust increasing, we do have some good policy tailwinds out here, that is going to mean that more of our clients are going to be either directly or indirectly exposed to on-chain payments or on-chain data of any kind.
[00:20:45] narration: yeah.
[00:20:46] rory henry: and let’s talk about the adoption here, because stable coin is another big piece of this. and for wider adoption, commercial use, and to get this at scale, we need these institutions to get on board. so can you kind of talk about stable coins and the adoption here?
[00:21:04] dr sean stein smith: sure. how much time do we have? two hours, three hours? so basically, just for the audience who might not be up to the minute here, is that if i’m talking about a privately issued stable coin, i’m talking about a token or a coin that’s issued by a private entity that is backed and pegged on a one-to-one basis in the vast majority of cases by the us dollar. so we have that crypto killer app that ai has had with chatgpt, that it’s an instrument that, okay, i can understand how this works. it’s a coin or a token on the one hand. so it has those upshots of being traceable, transparent, faster, and cheaper for payment purposes. but it also has that backstop of the us dollar of being sort of pegged. and it trades for most of these stable coins, the big ones that are used, trade in a very tight range on that one-to-one peg. so that makes it a much easier on-ramp for institutions and individuals to actually understand how this stuff works on the everyday, and two, for our conversation to actually start using it. and i also always like pointing out that household names, visa and mastercard, have both been able to process transactions on their blockchains in various cryptos, including stable coins, for the last, at this point, three to four years. and they both recently publicly announced their build-out and their expansion of these on-chain payment services. and paypal, the everyday app that everybody has on their phone, they have been in this space since 2014. and over the last 12 months, they have rolled out more services to allow both individuals and merchants to buy, sell, and hold crypto in their paypal wallets, including their own paypal stable coin. so in terms of the usage and the adoption of crypto, and by extension, blockchain, in the mainstream, i think stable coins are the obvious sort of target for policy or for advisors to have those conversations with our clients on.
[00:23:39] rory henry: is this why there’s more excitement during this bull run in 2025, as opposed to maybe the 2021? because we are seeing adoption driven by institutions and policymakers, regulators are getting on board here. is this why it seems maybe different than earlier bull runs here? this isn’t investment advice, once again.
[00:24:02] dr sean stein smith: of course not. and what i’d say there, rory, is that it’s always dangerous to say that it’s different this time. and that i’m probably going to aggravate some corners of the bitcoin maximalist area. but i’ve been an advocate that in order to get mainstream adoption, regulation was always going to be needed. and that the past bull runs of 2017 and 2021 were driven in large part by individuals who were buying bitcoin, hoping that it would go up in price. that was it. and obviously, in terms of policy, we had some headwinds out there. we had operation chokepoint, operation chokepoint 2.0, we had all kinds of things out there. we had lawsuits and fines, ftx didn’t help at all either. and so now, in 2024 and 2025, as a result of some changes in policy, there has been sort of a opening of the door for institutions to get into this space. and i do think that the approval of the bitcoin spot etf by blackrock in january of 2024, that was sort of the opening bell. and ever since then, there have been more institutions, be it chase, boa, citi, we have sofi, stripe, all of these household names implementing, building out and expanding their offerings around blockchain and for on-chain assets, be it bitcoin or otherwise. that has driven this current rally. because one, the institutions have obviously large appetites for these assets and these products. and two, more importantly, going back to your points, that endorsement of crypto and bitcoin by these institutions, who i bank at, my parents have banked at, my friends bank at, they’re all getting into crypto. so if everyone’s getting into it, and all these banks, they have the customer service, they have the insurance, they have all of those consumer safeguards around these products. and so that has, i think, given the recent rally more legs, and has also kept the price of bitcoin and other assets from dropping as dramatically as happened during previous bull runs, driven primarily by individuals. so i do think it is a bit different this time, because now, for the first time in the history of crypto, which only goes back to 2015, right, in terms of the sort of public facing market history of it, we now, for the first time, have the banks and other institutions, we have asset managers, we have payment processors who are integrating these assets into their platforms. but i will say that it’s been very interesting to watch, because i’ve been involved in this space since the end of 2015. it’s been interesting to watch rory, how the idea of bitcoin as this sort of decentralized, outside of the scope of regulators and banks, we’re going to disintermediate banks and government in a short decade, it has gone the whole other way. and now we chase having their own crypto products, we have blackrock having their biggest etf, being the bitcoin etf. and we have talks about the federal government, you know, converting their current holdings into a bitcoin stockpile. it’s been very interesting to watch. but i do think having that as part of the current bull market has helped it sort of go longer and have more, i think, strength.
[00:27:57] rory henry: yeah, i know you wanted to talk about the implications here of bitcoin in the retirement ecosystem into 401ks and 403bs. can you kind of expand on that for our audience?
[00:28:07] dr sean stein smith: yeah, sure thing. so in august of 2025, there was a order signed out of the white house, which basically said that going forward, and it was in coordination with the department of labor, and the order said that going forward, plan managers, and that’s the 401k and 403b plan managers, did not have to exclude bitcoin linked products going forward. now, now the order, it came out towards the end of august. so it has not gotten the coverage that i honestly believe it should. but if you actually put that into scope, right? if we talk about companies taking bitcoin for payments, that’s fine. but the 401k market and the 403b market, that’s a $12 trillion marketplace just here in the us. and so if we have plan managers having the option, right, right, there is no mandate, there is no order, they have the option to now start to integrate into onboard those products into their mainstream offerings. that is a major step forward and a major leg up in terms of getting investors exposed to bitcoin via, again, a household name that has all the safeguards, insurance, and investor coverage that these newer investors are going to need. so i do think that’s a major step forward in terms of one, getting the institutions more on board, getting more educational content out there, and three, sort of mainstreaming crypto and bitcoin. because honestly, to me, bitcoin is an asset class by itself. i’ve been arguing this probably, you go back to the earlier episodes, i’ve been arguing that since then, but that bitcoin, it’s an asset class, right? there are other tokens, other coins that have a better function as a medium of doing business. but bitcoin, it’s an asset class. and if we have plan managers that have the option to add them into their plan offerings, that’s going to increase the education, increase the transparency, and increase the endorsement of these products for customers that are interested in them. yeah.
[00:30:38] rory henry: all right. i want to kind of wrap up here, but i wanted to get your commentary on the recent sam altman, i don’t know if you saw the sam altman, brad gerstner podcast, where he asked him, how can a company with 13 billion in revenue, you know, make a $1.4 trillion spend commitment? can you kind of talk about that? i mean, you know, all these data centers and ai and the potential for cannibalization here. i mean, these are some big numbers. i’d love to get your commentary on that and what’s going on with openai here.
[00:31:12] dr sean stein smith: yeah. so i think that i should issue a kind of caveat here that anything around altman and his company is always going to be subject to change in a very fast way, right? and there has been quite a bit talked about recently. and so there are two aspects to this, rory. one is there is more and more conversation as to how real is this ai train, right? how real is it? are these firms actually making money? because revenue is one thing, profit’s an entirely different animal. the answer is, is that these ai firms right now, the vast majority of them aren’t turning a profit on their core operations, right? that’s just how it is. and, you know, it’s a fast growing space. it is transformative, but it is not profitable on the whole as of yet. and there’s been a ton of conversation with altman at the center of it, which i kind of think he likes in terms of getting government guarantees, government partnerships for building out data centers for how to source the energy, you know, for all these data centers for how to source the water, for all of these huge, huge data centers. i do think we are entering the phase here where a few of the numbers out here, a few of the forecasts might be a little bit, getting a little bubbly. i would not say that it’s a bubble, but i think we are starting to froth a bit in terms of the forecast, in terms of the expectations that a few of these ai firms have in terms of the spend, in terms of how they’re going to get that money to build out these data centers to fuel their growth. and i saw a note come out from a bank recently, and i forget which bank it was. but their estimates were that for those growth projections and the revenue and the profits to actually hit, it was going to take a $650 billion revenue runway annually going out for as far as their models could model out. now, i think we all have to ask, how reasonable is that? is any one firm going to be able to capture that? or to your point, going back to our earlier conversation, if all of these large language models, and they are all large language models, are training off of these very similar pools of data and are being used by the same chunks of people to do the same tasks, are people going to want to pay a premium for any one? or conversely, are we going to end up with these ai bots and ai agents being treated more as a software as a service, being added into existing infrastructure? and i don’t know sort of where that conversation is going to end up. but i would say that ai, and i’m sure that your audience can go online and pull up any charts about nvidia and openai and apple and investing into each other. so there is that aspect of it too. i do think that it’s an industry that is going to take a ton of capital to ramp up to get it even close to their forecasts. i don’t think we are going to hit that. and i think we are entering a tiny bit of a kind of bubbly phase. i wouldn’t call it the ai bubble, because ai has some real promise and it’s being used to do real things. but i do think the valuations and the forecasts are getting a little ahead of the realities right now.
[00:35:10] rory henry: it’s very interesting times. all right. this has been awesome, sean. once again, i appreciate you coming on the show here. is there anything else that you want to share with the audience before we end here?
[00:35:20] dr sean stein smith: yeah. all that i would say there is that i’m very easy to find on social media. i’m at sean steinsmith everywhere. and also be on the lookout, i have a whole new book coming out in q1, 2026 on these topics and more.
[00:35:37] rory henry: what’s the name of the book?
[00:35:38] dr sean stein smith: you know, rory, i have to admit, i cannot think of the exact title right now, but it is coming out q1, 2026. yeah.
[00:35:46] rory henry: i know you write a lot here, sean. you’re all over the place. so i’m thankful that you came on the show. you’re one of the… you and donnie shimamoto are the three-time guests here that have been on the show, so i appreciate you coming on. i can’t wait to have you on again in the future. all right, rory. thank you so much again, my friend. thank you, eddie. all right.