Gabe Stengel wants to replace bankers with Rogo AI agents
By Maya Ellison · Reporting from Detroit ·
By turning human expertise into proprietary software, Rogo aims to automate capital markets, but this drive for efficiency threatens to hollow out the workforce and concentrate financial power.
The cold math of replacing the human analyst
On the latest episode of Invest Like the Best, Gabe Stengel, co-founder of Rogo, laid out a vision for the future of finance that is as efficient as it is chilling. He argued that within a decade, the world’s top investment firms will derive 90% of their enterprise value not from the people they hire, but from the software, data, and autonomous systems they own. For Stengel, the goal is to take the latent knowledge in the minds of the best bankers and codify it into a system that operates without the friction of human fatigue or moral hesitation. He isn't just selling a productivity tool; he is selling the systematic replacement of the junior investment professional.
The myth of the human-in-the-loop
Stengel’s pitch is that we are witnessing a transition from “co-pilot” tools to full “autopilot” agents. He scoffs at the idea that finance is too complex for AI, pointing to the “messy” private markets as the perfect wedge for his software to take root. By wiring up the compliance, data rooms, and deal-making workflows, Rogo aims to make capital markets more liquid and efficient. The industry’s ‘innovator’s dilemma’ here is simple: if you don’t automate, you’ll be outcompeted by those who do. But this framing conveniently ignores the cost. When we turn the expertise of a generation into a proprietary data set, we aren't just making things faster; we are hollowing out the apprenticeship model that once defined these institutions.
The high price of efficiency
Stengel admits that his internal company culture involves ranking employees by their AI usage and posting the names of the bottom users—a practice he calls ‘hilarious’ but which his own team clearly finds terrifying. This is the reality of the ‘AI-native’ firm: a workplace where human value is measured by how quickly you can be superseded by your own digital twin. Stengel claims this is about supercharging the world, but it is really about concentrating the power of capital allocation into even fewer, more automated hands. When the ‘geniuses’ are all in the data center, the only people left standing are those who own the servers. We are building a financial system that prizes the speed of a transaction over the judgment of a citizen, and in the process, we are ensuring that the future of finance is a closed loop where the only thing that matters is the next token of profit.