Hedge-fund manager Brian Kelly says he has replaced a global team of employees with artificial intelligence agents at Bracket22, cutting annual labour-related costs from about $5 million to between $30,000 and $40,000.
Kelly, who previously ran a cryptocurrency hedge fund, founded the new trading firm to operate using agentic AI. Bracket22 invests his own capital across cryptocurrencies, stocks and commodities.
“I used to have about seven or eight employees all around the world,” Kelly said. “Between their salaries and compute and healthcare and everything like that, my payroll was well into the millions of dollars per year.”
Including office space and bonuses, he estimated that the total cost of running the operation before adopting AI was roughly $5 million a year. The new figure covers the AI agents, computing power and other requirements needed to replicate the firm’s work.
The operation offers a striking example of how financial firms are testing whether AI can perform tasks traditionally handled by analysts, traders and other specialists.
Kelly has assigned distinct responsibilities to a series of named agents. Steffi is used for technical analysis, Desmond focuses on quantitative strategies, while Houston acts as a form of mission control, bringing the different strands of research together.
“I’ve crafted each of these agents to be a specialist in their field,” Kelly said. “I wanted to isolate them and I wanted to get their unbiased view on what I’m doing.”
He retains responsibility for the final trade. “And then I use my human judgment and human insight to make the final decision,” he said.
Kelly said the system had made him “at least 10 times more productive”. He argued that the wider opportunity for financial institutions was not simply to remove staff, but to use AI to expand the capacity of existing teams.
“If you take a staff of 100, [with AI] you’ve got a staff of a thousand,” he said. “It’s not necessarily just, hey, you can replace everybody with AI agents. You can make your existing employees at least 10 times — maybe more — more productive.”
His approach comes as major banks explore similar technology. JPMorgan Chase chief executive Jamie Dimon has said AI is already reshaping the bank’s workforce and that it has plans for a major redeployment of employees, while the firm has been developing agents capable of working autonomously for extended periods.
Morgan Stanley is also directing some work towards AI, although enthusiasm across the industry has been tempered by concerns about the risks of allowing automated systems to replace human judgement. A Goldman Sachs partner has warned that excessive reliance on the technology could weaken bankers’ reasoning skills.
Kelly closed his cryptocurrency hedge fund in early 2025 and began experimenting with AI later that year. He was previously known as a trader on CNBC’s Fast Money.
