- David Solomon said AI will make “nuanced changes” to hiring over the next three years.
- The CEO said his bank is hiring at least 2,400 interns this year, in line with pre-COVID levels.
- He also had a phone-based suggestion for young job seekers.
Solomon, who argued in a late-May New York Times op-ed that the AI jobs apocalypse is overblown, falls firmly in the latter camp.
The bigger challenge, Solomon said during the podcast, is figuring out how to train young workers when AI can instantly produce answers that once required hours of grunt work.
He recalled starting his banking career in an age without minute-by-minute digital trackers for stock prices. To compare stock performance, he said, he dug through microfiche, pulled prices from The Wall Street Journal, plotted them on graph paper, and did the math by hand.
It was slow, but it taught him useful critical thinking skills, he said.
“Now, if you ask for it, you get it instantaneously,” he said. “Has your brain really absorbed what’s actually happening?”
Operating in a world with answers at his entry-level intern’s fingertips means Goldman has to rethink skill training, Solomon said.
Still, his advice to young bankers in the AI age was decidedly old-school: pick up the phone and talk to people.
“A telephone call to someone is 10 times more valuable than a text or an email,” Solomon said. “My daughter says that’s an unverified statistic. I know that’s true.”
Goldman didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
