For generations, becoming a senior banker meant starting at the bottom.
Young analysts spent long nights preparing documents, analysing numbers and building presentations. They learnt the business by doing the repetitive work nobody else wanted to do. A few years later, some became associates, then managers, and eventually senior decision-makers.
Artificial intelligence could disrupt that entire system.
The question facing Wall Street is no longer simply how many jobs AI might eliminate. It is what happens when AI removes the jobs that were supposed to train the next generation of bankers.
THE BANKER WHO MANAGES AI
Goldman Sachs executive Kevin Sneader has offered a glimpse of what that future could look like.
New finance recruits may not have to wait years before managing people. Instead, they could begin their careers supervising AI agents.
“When our young folks now start work, they’re managing agents,” Sneader said at the Milken Institute Asia Summit in Singapore, according to Bloomberg.
That turns the traditional banking hierarchy on its head.
The youngest employees could have AI doing much of the analysis and preparatory work, while their own job becomes deciding what those systems should do, checking their output and stepping in when human judgement is needed.
But that raises an awkward question: if AI handles the work that juniors used to learn from, how do juniors acquire the experience needed to become seniors?
THE MIDDLE MANAGER PROBLEM
The disruption does not stop at entry-level jobs.
Sneader said middle managers could face a “generational challenge” as their traditional responsibilities are redistributed. Instead of managers coordinating layers of employees, some of those management functions could move directly to frontline workers supervising AI systems.
“That management task no longer sits with the middle manager,” Sneader said.
Goldman Sachs president John Waldron has separately described some of the firm’s operations as a “human assembly line” that is ripe for automation.
The traditional professional-services pyramid is therefore under pressure: lots of junior workers at the bottom, fewer experienced employees above them and a small group of senior leaders at the top.
AI could make that pyramid much flatter.
FEWER JUNIORS, DIFFERENT BANKERS
Sandra Peterson of investment firm Clayton, Dubilier & Rice said the old model involved employees joining at the bottom and gradually progressing through each level.
With AI doing much of the grunt work, she questioned whether firms would need as many entry-level positions.
The Monetary Authority of Singapore sees a similar shift. Managing Director Chia Der Jiun said banks could need fewer graduates for analysis and preparatory work, while existing operations staff increasingly become supervisors of AI agents.
That does not necessarily mean Wall Street will suddenly stop hiring humans. Instead, banks may hire different kinds of humans.
AI specialists, people who can work across technology and business, and employees capable of supervising automated systems could become more valuable than workers whose primary role is processing information.
INDIA HAS A STAKE TOO
The shift matters well beyond New York.
Global banks have built enormous technology and operations centres in India, employing tens of thousands of people across Bengaluru, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Pune, Chennai and other cities.
As these operations adopt AI, the impact could reach the same career ladder that has made banking and financial technology attractive to Indian graduates.
The biggest change may therefore not be a dramatic wave of layoffs.
It could be a generation entering banking and discovering that the traditional first rung of the ladder no longer looks anything like it used to.
And if AI takes over the work that once taught bankers how to become bankers, Wall Street will have to answer a much harder question:
Who trains the next generation of humans?
– Ends