On my internship at Sagard

The Most Valuable Skill in Finance and Why AI Can't Replicate It

A reflection on my internship at Sagard.

When I arrived at Sagard, I expected to learn about private equity, fund structures, and how capital gets raised. I did learn those things. But the lesson that stayed with me was different, and it changed how I think about the question my generation asks constantly: which jobs will AI take?

What I thought investor relations was

Before the internship, if you had asked me what an investor relations professional does, I would have said something like: they communicate the firm's performance to investors through reports, presentations, and updates. Communication, the kind of work that, on paper, looks exactly like what AI does best. Language models can already draft investor letters, summarize fund performance, and answer questions about a portfolio instantly, in any tone you ask for.

So I walked in expecting a role that AI would soon replace.

What investor relations actually is

What I learned was almost the opposite. Investor relations is not fundamentally about transmitting information. It is about something harder to name: keeping investors' trust when nothing is certain.

I thought more about what an IR leader at an alternative asset manager actually navigates. Investors have committed capital for years into funds they cannot exit easily, invested in private companies whose value cannot be checked on a screen. Markets shift. Strategies evolve. Sometimes performance disappoints. And through all of it, someone has to be the human bridge between the firm and the people who trusted it with their money, often institutions managing pensions and endowments, where the money ultimately supports people's retirement security and the long-term missions of universities, hospitals, foundations, and other institutions.

That bridge is the IR person who:

Reads what isn't said. Real conversations are not on the presentation slides. An IR person notices the questions investors asked twice, the pauses, or the things they didn't bring up. A good IR person picks up on when an investor seems uneasy and deals with it early, before it turns into a bigger problem. That takes years of knowing people. An AI can answer the question you ask it. It can't hear the question you're not asking.

Spends credibility carefully. An IR professional's biggest asset is their own credibility, built up over their whole career. When they tell investors, "This quarter was hard, but here's why we're still confident," it only works because they've been honest with those investors for years, even when the news was bad. AI can write something that sounds perfect, but it has no track record. Trust isn't a writing problem.

Carries accountability. When an investor commits a huge amount of money partly because of conversations with a person, that person is responsible in a way no software is. There's a name, a face, a relationship that carries into next year and the year after. At first I thought of this as the pressure of the job. By learning more about the IR role, I saw it as the whole point of the job.

None of this means AI doesn't matter in investor relations; it's actually the opposite. All the mechanical parts of the job are changing fast: drafting documents, pulling data together, preparing for meetings, and answering routine investor questionnaires. I came to realize that the IR profession will embrace AI by letting AI handle that work and using the extra time for what only they can do: more conversations, stronger relationships, and better judgment.

What this taught me about the future of work

I went in curious about finance and came out with a theory about careers in general: the jobs most protected from AI aren't the ones with the most complicated tasks. AI is incredibly good at complicated tasks. The protected jobs are the ones where the product is trust, built between real people, over time, by being accountable. That is not a small category. But it is a demanding one, because trust cannot be optimized, downloaded, or faked for long. It has to be earned at human speed.

I'm sixteen, and my generation will work alongside AI more closely than any generation before us. During my internship at Sagard, I learned that my mentor's real job is a deeply human one, in an industry everyone assumes is all about numbers. After my internship at Sagard, I know where to aim: not at the tasks machines will do, but at the responsibilities only people can hold.

With gratitude to the team at Sagard for the generosity of their time and the openness of their answers.