Inside Goldman Sachs’ Big Bet on AI at Scale | PYMNTS.com

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Goldman Sachs is rolling out and scaling artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities across its business, as the investment bank harnesses the benefits of productivity and efficiency from this fast-moving technology.

“For us, this year is a story of scale — scale of adoption, scale of use cases,” said Belinda Neal, Goldmans’ chief operating officer of core engineering, head of product management and head of engineering partnerships.

“With generative AI, we’ve been really excited about some of the new potential of the technology to deliver efficiency and productivity benefits across the firm,” Neal said in an exclusive interview with PYMNTS.

PYMNTS data is showing a growing return on investment (ROI) as businesses are starting to reap the benefits of AI capital investments. Based on a survey of 540 C-suite executives, 57% of information firms report very positive ROI from their GenAI deployments. Other sectors are seeing varying returns.

Goldman’s Playbook

Neal said the investment bank is taking a multi-pronged approach to AI:

• It built Goldman’s in-house GS AI Platform to be the foundation for AI applications for different business use cases. The platform offers multiple state-of-the-art AI models but with Goldman’s guardrails.
• It is working with major technology companies to help it deploy AI capabilities at scale.
• It is focused on security and governance as a foundational guardrail.

Neal said a key enabler of AI throughout the company is the creation of “AI champions,” a team of employees within each business group tasked with finding the most effective use cases for AI in their line of business.

These AI champions form the “connective tissue” across the firm, she added. “That is an absolutely critical part of how adoption is going to be driven and where we’re going to see the highest value from” in its AI efforts.

One of Goldman’s internal AI applications is the GS AI Assistant, a generative AI chatbot rolling out to its bankers, traders and other workers.

It can do things such as summarize documents, draft emails, create bullet points for a speech and more. The assistant will eventually transform into a smarter sidekick with the traits of a seasoned Goldman executive.

Neal said about 10,000 employees currently have access, which will be rolled out across the company this year “subject to governance.”

GenAI chatbots have a tendency to hallucinate, or make things up in a convincing way, which is a security risk for any company, but especially the highly regulated financial services industry.

Neal said there’s still a human reviewer of the chatbot’s responses, and employees are trained to be mindful of these hallucination risks. It is “absolutely something that we’re looking to continue to improve over time, through the use of new models (and) new practices,” she said.

Goldman joins other Wall Street banking titans JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America in aggressively developing AI capabilities.

Read more: Goldman Debuts in-House AI That’s ‘Like Talking to an Employee’

Supercharging 12,000 Developers

A Goldman priority is using AI to enhance the performance of its engineering group.

Neal said the firm has more than 12,000 developers, which constitute a quarter of its total workforce. That means productivity and efficiency gains achieved in this group would have a large impact on the company.

“The developer use case is one of the early use cases where we’ve really seen large-scale adoption and large-scale benefit,” Neal said. “What we’re going to start to see over time, especially over the course of the next 12 to 24 months, is more scale and adoption of those capabilities.”

But more than equipping its developers, Goldman wants them to stay on top of AI’s advances.

“We really want to be able to … employ that best-in-class technology as quickly as possible into some of these platforms so that we can enable our developers and our individuals across the businesses to use the best technology,” Neal said.

A third priority use case revolves around governance and how the firm thinks about risk and control, Neal said. “We’ve doubled down on our focus around ensuring safe and secure AI deployment.”

Tapping Into Tech

Goldman’s Chairman and CEO David Solomon has said that CEOs see the benefits of AI.

“The more complicated thing that CEOs are wrestling with is how the technology can be deployed to significantly change operational processes,” Solomon said at the Cisco AI Summit in Palo Alto, California, in January. “But to do that, you have to fundamentally change your processes, and that’s a very hard thing for organizations to do.”

As Goldman rolls out its large language models, it is already preparing for the advent of AI agents. Neal said Goldman is taking a holistic approach by thinking of agentic AI as reinventing entire workflows, not just single tasks. These agents will also become reasoning models over time, she said.

Looking ahead, Neal said there’s a lot of interest in the firm around AI use cases for document or life cycle management.

“I’d say this is just the next generation of us being able to use technology to drive value to the business in terms of how we’re operating efficiently, but also how we’re delivering best-in-class service for our clients,” Neal said.