Goldman Sachs is rolling out a Generative AI assistant to its staff in the first stage of a programme that aims to create a bot capable of thinking and acting like a veteran employee.
The bank has released a program called GS AI assistant to about 10,000 employees so far, with the goal that all the company’s knowledge workers will have it this year, CIO Marco Argenti told CNBC. It will initially help with tasks including summarizing or proofreading emails or translating code from one language to another.
Today it can respond to queries, write emails and summarize lengthy documents, but expectations are high that future versions will exhibit agentic abilities, performing multistep tasks with little human intervention.
In speaking with CNBC, Argenti — who joined from Amazon in 2019 — repeatedly likened the AI program to a new employee that will absorb Goldman culture over the coming years.
Initially, the tool will mostly produce answers based on Goldman data that has been fed into AI models from OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Meta’s Llama, depending on the task, said Argenti. The bank is also looking at models from companies including Anthropic, Mistral and Cohere, he added.
“The AI assistant becomes really like talking to another GS employee,” Argenti said. “As we progress, the second step is when you’re starting to have this agentic behavior. That’s where the model is going to start to do things like a Goldman employee, not only say things like a Goldman employee.”
In practice, that means that just as an experienced Goldman employee would know to double-check their work with multiple data sources or use a specific algorithm for a calculation, the AI will absorb those lessons, he said. Further down the line, in perhaps three to five years time, the model would “actually reason more and become more like the way a Goldman employee would think,”
Goldman is among a wave of Wall Street firms rolling out generative AI technology. Morgan Stanley is understood to be following a similar path, distibuting OpenAI chatbot tools to up to 40,000 employees in its Wall Street division, while JPMorgan has also released an inhouse developed Generative AI chatbot to staff, likening it to a having a research analyst at your desk.
A recent report from Bloomberg estimated that up to 200,000 jobs could be at risk as intelligent robots become embedded in financial firms.