Bankers’ Winter Getaway to Sunny Florida Is Upended By AI Chaos

It was supposed to be a relatively relaxing work week in the South Florida sun for the hundreds of bankers, brokers, advisers, portfolio managers, analysts and investors attending a series of financial industry conferences from Miami to Boca Raton. Then AI crashed the party.

As traders dumped financial services stocks on Tuesday due to mounting fears that new artificial intelligence tools threaten the businesses as we know them, Patrick Lemmens, an executive director at Robeco Group and 30-year investing veteran, was wandering from meeting to meeting at the UBS Financial Services Conference in Key Biscayne, watching the chaos unfold on mobile phones and computer screens.