One sort of thing you could do, if you work at an investing firm, is say “I like Microsoft Corp., I think this artificial intelligence thing is big, I think the stock will go up.” And then you buy Microsoft stock with your firm’s capital, and hopefully it goes up.

Another sort of thing you could do, if you work at an investing firm, is design a complex software system that ingests millions of data points to find predictive signals and then uses those signals to make automated low-latency trades in multiple assets on multiple exchanges with limited human supervision. You write thousands of lines of code, you test the system, you put it into production, it runs on its own and hopefully it makes money.