- Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon spoke at the Cisco AI Summit this week.
- He told the conference that AI is changing processes like drafting IPO filings and analyst research.
- Potential efficiency gains will rely on the execution of employees changing their processes.
One of Wall Street’s top bosses just gave a revealing look into how AI is changing the lives of bankers and analysts in its investment bank.
Ten years ago, when Goldman wanted to win the business of a company going public, it would appoint a team of around half a dozen people who, over the course of two weeks, would draft a prospectus, known as an S-1, a significant regulatory document that details the business, financial and risk factors, among other things. The idea was to show would-be clients all the thought and legwork Goldman bankers had already put in.
“Now you can basically have something that’s 95% of the way there in a few minutes,” CEO David Solomon said at Cisco’s AI Summit on Wednesday. If the 95% is “now a commodity,” he said, the remaining 5% matters a lot because it’s the margin where Goldman can get an edge.
It’s a big deal as Goldman is one of the top banks in the world that take companies public, along with Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan. Yet it is also just one of the ways that Goldman is deploying AI to reduce grunt work and move more efficiently.
Solomon charted a road map for how Goldman Sachs is strategizing around AI. Getting engineers to free up capacity by being 30% more productive with coding tasks has been “the first and most obvious” given its 11,000 engineers, he said. Another priority is making better use of Goldman’s data, which includes proprietary data tracking every trade the firm has done over the past 40 years and making it available to clients.
The third, and perhaps most visible and directly client-facing, is how AI is deployed in the investment banking business. Enabling the bank to do more work with the help of AI — giving workers a kind of “information superintelligence” would further boost the already booming firm, which brought in more than $53 billion in 2024.
Beyond using AI to draft IPO prospectuses to court potential clients, Solomon said Goldman is “focused on how we can completely change kind of what you’d call the material preparation” involved in investment banking. That includes prepping bankers with information ahead of client meetings and getting data and information to clients to better make investment decisions. Goldman is also building an “investment banking copilot” that will be armed with the bank’s own data, he said. Copilots typically describe AI tools that help workers be more productive, drafting text, analyzing information, and suggesting ideas.
It’s not just bankers who can anticipate changes to their daily processes.
The Goldman CEO also spoke of the potential for AI to shake up analyst workflows in equity research.
One of the most significant things analysts and their dedicated teams do is report on companies and feed that information into models, he said, often to gauge a company’s trajectory, growth, and risks.
“Obviously that can all be automated now with this technology,” Solomon said, referring to modern AI.
But that doesn’t mean those jobs will be replaced with technology. Rather, “you really need the analysts and you need smaller teams, and you need a horizontal engine that basically does all that work for everyone, as opposed to individual pods for every single industry,” Solomon said.
To be sure, the success of these AI deployments will rely, in part, on the execution of change management.
In the case of generating efficiencies and cutting down on redundancies in the equity research example, “that’s a massive process change,” Solomon said.
“It’s hard because people don’t want to change their process. They like their team, they like the fact they have complete control,” Solomon said.
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