THE SIGNAL
Goldman Sachs deployed its GS AI Assistant to all 46,000 employees this month, moving from a 10,000-person pilot to full firmwide access. A specialized version called Banker Copilot is already cutting M&A preparation time by 40% in tested workflows. Goldman's own research published the same week says AI could automate 25% of all work hours, with entry-level workers in their 20s and 30s most exposed. Unemployment among that group in AI-adjacent roles rose 3 percentage points in 2025. The firm warning about early-career displacement and the firm compressing deal preparation cycles by nearly half are the same firm. That is worth sitting with.
WHY IT MATTERS TO YOU
Goldman's labor market research identifies the roles most exposed: credit analysts, accountants, legal assistants, and customer service staff. Those roles share one characteristic: they are built around structured, repetitive tasks that follow documented logic. That is also a description of most junior banking and consulting work in the first two years. Goldman's own analysis concludes that AI is more likely to automate tasks inside jobs than eliminate entire careers. What changes is the ratio: less time on document assembly and data gathering, more time on validation, exception handling, and client judgment. The candidates who understand that ratio shift before they walk in the door arrive with a specific advantage.
THE SKILL OR TOOL
The Banker Copilot compresses the assembly work: building models from scratch, gathering data, formatting initial documents. The analyst who walks in knowing which assumptions to challenge, which outputs to trust, and which discrepancies to escalate before the deck reaches the MD uses those freed hours as leverage. That is the judgment worth building deliberately, before the workflow stops providing the repetition that used to build it passively. The Goldman Operations and Risk Management simulations on Forage walk through the exact workflows Banker Copilot is now handling. Completing them before your first role is how you arrive with the judgment the compression requires. Both free. theforage.com, search Goldman Sachs.
THE QUESTION
If Goldman's AI cuts M&A prep time by 40%, what do you think the other 40% of a junior banker's time will be spent on, and are you building toward that now?
— Marco Meneses
Finance & Business Analytics @ Wilkes University | Greenwood Project FinTech Scholar
theanalystedgehq.com
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