There are no more ordinary Tuesdays in finance since AI grabbed all the headlines. To highlight this, a Goldman Sachs partner has just put a clear warning on the table.
Chris Churchman leads Marquee, the bank’s digital platform for institutional clients. Speaking on the firm’s Exchanges podcast he was direct.
“There’s a huge danger here that in the era of AI, we outsource our reasoning to these models, and we have cognitive atrophy that stops us being able to reason from first principles ourselves,” said Chris Churchman, who leads Goldman’s digital platform for institutional clients.
Churchman has watched the change from the inside. Junior bankers once learned by sitting next to seniors and working live client requests.
“You learn by doing, and a lot of knowledge is tacit, it was never written down,” he said.
Now the same work can move to models. He compared the risk to GPS. People stopped learning how to navigate. Search engines did the same for memory. Reasoning could be next.
Banks have already looked at using AI to cut the number of juniors needed for each senior. Churchman says the real test is balance. Keep the tools. Protect the apprenticeship culture that built the best people.
Goldman still needs the next generation to reason from first principles when the models fall quiet.
