Goldman Sachs executive Kevin Sneader says young bankers will manage AI agents from day one

Junior finance recruits will start their careers managing artificial intelligence agents rather than spending years doing manual analysis, upending the traditional path to the top of Wall Street.

Speaking at the Milken Institute Asia Summit in Singapore on 8 October, Kevin Sneader, who leads Goldman Sachs' business in Asia-Pacific outside Japan, said new recruits are essentially managing artificial intelligence agents from the moment they arrive. He told the summit that junior staff must learn to direct what he described as a "virtual army" of digital tools.

For decades, the standard corporate path involved spending years doing grunt work and manual data collection before earning the right to manage people. Finding new roles for middle managers whose oversight is no longer required will be a defining challenge for the industry, Sneader added.

The squeeze on middle management

Because front-line juniors are now directly supervising these digital systems, the traditional layer of middle management is being bypassed. Sneader admitted that the future of these middle-tier employees remains highly uncertain.

"That management task no longer sits with the middle manager; it sits with the front line," Sneader said during a panel discussion on AI and finance. "We don't quite know what's going to happen to that group."

Other financial leaders on the panel agreed that the classic professional services pyramid is under threat. Sandra Peterson, an operating partner at investment firm Clayton, Dubilier & Rice, noted that in the past, young professionals slowly climbed from one tier to the next if they survived the workload. But with AI automating heavy-lifting tasks, Peterson questioned whether firms will need to hire as many graduates in the first place.

How regulators are responding

Regulators are already preparing for the fallout. Chia Der Jiun, managing director of the Monetary Authority of Singapore, told the panel that operations staff must transition into supervisors of AI systems.

Recognising that banks will need fewer graduates for basic analytical work, Singapore has begun working with universities to modernise degrees. The city-state is also funding programmes to retrain existing bank staff in AI skills.

For ambitious graduates, Sneader argued the shifting landscape is not entirely negative. Because AI lowers the cost and headcount needed to start a business, he suggested young professionals have an unprecedented opportunity to build their own start-ups rather than focusing purely on climbing old corporate structures.

"There’s never been a better time to be an entrepreneur to create something," Sneader said, adding that people perhaps spend too much time worrying about the old world.