Sam Altman’s OpenAI comes to the grunts on Wall Street as AI continues to change the entry level

Sam Altman’s tech giant has enlisted more than 100 former investment bankers to help train its AI models how to build financial models that can automate hours of entry-level tasks, according to documents seen by Bloomberg and I mentioned Tuesday. Recruits, including former employees of JPMorgan Chase, Morgan StanleyBloomberg reported that Goldman Sachs and Goldman Sachs are contributing their expertise to a project codenamed “Mercury.”

But experts say luck The move is likely to change entry-level roles rather than replace them, a popular idea among economists in the wake of the wave of AI adoption.

“I’m not convinced we’re going to get rid of entry-level workers any time soon, but I can imagine a world where the skill set we need these entry-level workers to have is different,” said Sean Dubravac, an economist and CEO of the Avrio Institute, a research and consulting firm. luck.

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

Investment banking analysts regularly score more than 80 hours per week When working on direct deals, utilize Microsoft Excel to provide financial models for leveraged mergers and acquisitions.

“These are all areas where data is abundant, templates are standardized, and the process can be learned from iteration,” Dubravac said. “Within the next year, I expect companies will move quickly to try to automate the 60% to 70% of the time analysts currently spend on these lower-level tasks.”

As routine tasks are automated, and AI is more integrated into junior analysts’ workflows, senior analysts will find more “complex” tasks to perform – such as building more complex financial models, or performing more quantitative analysis, skills they would typically learn more over the course of their careers.

“We often overestimate how impactful some technology will be when it comes to eliminating work as we know it,” Dubravac said. “Just as Excel spreadsheets did in the past, AI will simplify some work.”

But only 38% of organizations using AI expect that using generative AI models will have little impact on the size of their organizations’ workforces in the next three years, according to a recent report. Mackenzie a report Published in March.

“Respondents in larger organizations are more likely than others to say their organization has reduced headcount as a result of time saved,” the report stated.

For strategy and corporate finance, 29% of respondents expected no change in headcount at their companies as a result of using AGI, according to the report. Just under a third expect to reduce headcount, and 30% expect headcount to increase over the next three years.

“I can see that staff numbers will remain mostly flat, but at the same time, workloads will become lighter in some areas and heavier in others,” Dubravac said.

Ram Srinivasan, Managing Director of Consulting at JLL, a global real estate and business technology services firm, said: luck OpenAI’s initiative to train AI models in financial modeling represents a “natural evolution in investment banking.”

“AI will give every analyst superpowers and allow banks to superimpose human vision,” Srinivasan said. “Analysts become reviewers and customizers instead of building from scratch, allowing each person to support more deals at once.”

But some experts do not share this rosy view. World Economic Forum Future of Jobs Report It revealed in January that 40% of employers expect to reduce their workforce as AI can automate tasks.

The transfer of basic skills to automation also strongly highlights the value of education for entry-level workers. A reconnaissance A report published by the Indeed Career Lab last year found that nearly half of Gen Z job seekers in the United States (49%) believe that AI has directly reduced the value of their higher education in the job market. But this may mean that financial firms will be looking for candidates with new skills to help support banks in a time of rapid adaptation, Dubravac said. He added that candidates with experience working with AI models will help financial companies build their own products.

“There may be a stronger demand for people with deeper experience in artificial intelligence,” Dubravac said. “You can bring some of that internally, because at the end of the day, finance is not just about getting the right answer, but getting it more quickly than your competition, or getting an answer that is more unique than your competition.”