Sam Altman’s OpenAI Comes to Wall Street Workers as AI Continues to Transform Entry Level | Luck

Sam Altman’s tech giant has tapped more than 100 former investment bankers to help train its artificial intelligence models to build financial models to automate hours of basic tasks, according to documents seen by Bloomberg and reported Tuesday. The workforce includes former employees of JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs and contributes their expertise to the project, codenamed “Mercury”. Bloomberg reported.

Tell the experts LuckBut the move is likely to transform rather than replace entry-level roles, which is the prevailing thinking among economists following the wave of AI adoption.

“I’m not convinced we’re going to get rid of entry-level workers anytime soon, but I can imagine a world where the skill set we need those entry-level workers to have is going to be different,” said Shawn DuBravac, economist and CEO of the Avrio Institute, a research and consulting firm. Luck.

DuBravac believes the “first wave of automation” will hit the structured, repeatable tasks that junior analysts spend hours during the week working for their superiors, such as cleaning and formatting spreadsheets, building financial models and putting together presentations.

Investment banking analysts regularly clock more than 80 hours per week working on live trades and use Microsoft Excel to provide financial models for leveraged M&A.

“These are all areas where there is enough data, the templates are standardized, and the process can be learned from repetition,” DuBravac said. “Over the next year, I would expect companies to move quickly to try to automate 60 to 70% of the time that analysts currently spend on these lower-level tasks.”

As routine, mundane tasks are automated and artificial intelligence is more integrated into younger analysts’ workflows, senior analysts will find more “sophisticated” work for them to do — work like building more complex financial models or doing more quantitative analysis, skills they could typically learn later in their careers, he added.

“We often overestimate the impact certain technologies will have in terms of eradicating work as we know it,” DuBravac said. “Just like Excel spreadsheets used to be, (AI) will make work easier.”

However, according to a McKinsey report published in March, only 38% of organizations that use AI predict that the use of generative AI models will have little effect on the size of their organization’s workforce in the next three years.

“However, respondents in larger organizations are more likely than others to say that their organizations have cut staff as a result of time savings,” the report said.

In terms of strategy and corporate finance, 29% of respondents predicted that the number of employees in their companies would not change due to the use of gen-AI, according to the report. Less than a third expect a reduction in the number of employees and 30% predict an increase in the number of employees in the next three years.

“I’ve seen staff numbers stay mostly the same, but at the same time, the workload will decrease in some areas and increase in others,” DuBravac said.

Ram Srinivasan, managing director of consulting at JLL, a global commercial real estate and technology services company, said Luck OpenAI’s initiative to train AI models on financial modeling represents a “natural evolution in investment banking.”

“AI will give every analyst superpowers and enable banks to augment human insight,” Srinivasan said. “Analysts become reviewers and recruiters rather than creators from scratch, allowing each person to support multiple offerings simultaneously.”

However, some experts do not share this rosy outlook. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs report in January revealed that 40% of employers expect to cut staff where AI can automate tasks.

Transferring the necessary skills to automation also greatly highlights the value of education for entry-level workers. A survey released last year by Indeed’s Hiring Lab found that roughly half of America’s Gen Z job hunters (49%) believe that AI has directly reduced the value of their college education in the job market. But that may mean financial firms will seek candidates with new skills to help banks in a time of rapid adjustment, Dubravac said. Candidates who have experience working with artificial intelligence models will help financial firms create their own products, he added.

“There could be a stronger demand for people who have a deeper understanding of AI,” Dubravac said. “You bring some of that yourself because at the end of the day in finance, it’s not just about getting the right answer, it’s about getting it faster than your competition or getting a more differentiated answer than your competition.”