SINGAPORE – The newest hires in finance will not have to wait years to become managers. They will be overseeing artificial intelligence agents from the time they join, raising the question of what happens to the current middle managers, according to Goldman Sachs Group’s Kevin Sneader.
“When our young folks now start work, they’re managing agents,” Sneader, who leads the Wall Street bank’s business in Asia Pacific outside Japan, said on Oct 8 at the Milken Institute Asia Summit in Singapore.
“They have to make the most of this virtual army that they’ve now got.”
Previous generations often spent years in the job before they got to manage anyone, and re-deploying these managers will be the “generational challenge for many, many segments”, he added.
His comments suggest AI could upend the traditional banking career path, where junior staff spend years on analysis and preparatory work before moving up to manage others. Rather than fretting about mass job losses due to the technology, Sneader and others speaking on a panel about AI and finance were focused on how roles would be reshaped.
“That management task no longer sits with the middle manager; it sits with the front line,” Sneader said. “We don’t quite know what’s going to happen to that group.”
Sandra Peterson, an operating partner at investment firm Clayton, Dubilier & Rice, said the traditional career ladder may not survive.
“It used to be that professional service firms were pyramids,” she said. “You’d show up, and you know, you march your way through, and if you survived, you got to the next level, the next level, the next level.”
She said that with AI doing much of the grunt work, it is not clear firms would need as many entry-level positions.
Singapore’s financial regulator sees the same shifts happening. Operations staff will need to become managers and supervisors of AI agents, Chia Der Jiun, managing director of the Monetary Authority of Singapore, said at the same panel.
Banks will also need fewer fresh graduates for analysis and preparatory work, he said.
The city-state has been preparing for these changes through training bank staff in AI skills as well as working with the universities to ensure its graduates are ready for the new world, Chia said.
For young people however, Sneader said the upside goes beyond angling for a finance job.
“There’s never been a better time to be an entrepreneur to create something,” he said, noting that fewer resources are needed to start a business nowadays.
“That’s quite an exciting part of the future when we’re all spending too much time, perhaps worrying about the old world.” BLOOMBERG
