AI Adoption Set to Transform Entry-Level Roles in Finance

Efforts to automate entry-level tasks in finance won’t necessarily eliminate entry-level roles, Fortune reported Wednesday (Oct. 22).

Instead, the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) solutions will likely transform those roles, according to the report.

While automation will eliminate much of the work junior analysts now do on spreadsheets, financial models and pitch decks, those analysts will likely be assigned more “sophisticated” work like building more complex financial models or performing more quantitative analysis, Shawn DuBravac, CEO of Avrio Institute, told Fortune.

Those are skills that junior analysts traditionally learned later in their careers, DuBravac said.

“I could see headcounts staying mostly flat, but at the same time, workloads will become lighter in some areas and heavier in others,” DuBravac said, per the report.

Ram Srinivasan, managing director of consulting at JLL, told Fortune that AI will give analysts “superpowers.”

“Analysts become reviewers and customizers rather than builders from scratch, allowing each person to support more deals simultaneously,” Srinivasan said, per the report.

Fortune interviewed these experts for reaction to a Tuesday (Oct. 21) report from Bloomberg that said OpenAI is working with former investment bankers to train AI models to handle the industry’s entry-level tasks, according to the report.

According to that Bloomberg report, the company has hired more than 100 former investment bankers from firms like Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley to help its AI models learn how to build and interpret financial models.

The report said the project is part of OpenAI’s effort to move beyond consumer chatbots and into enterprise use cases that generate steady, high-value revenue.

When PYMNTS looked into “AI’s great jobs debate” in September, it was reported that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in May that AI could displace 70% of all jobs. Also during May, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said the technology could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs and create unemployment of 10% to 20% within the next one to five years.

Citi said in June 2024 that 54% of jobs in the banking sector have a higher potential for automation, while another 12% could be augmented by AI. The bank said other industries with a high potential for automation include insurance (46%), energy (43%) and capital markets (40%).