By Rthvika Suvarna | Updated on Oct 08, 2026 at 10:12 AM
Junior Wall Street recruits are starting their careers managing artificial intelligence agents rather than spending years doing entry-level grunt work, calling into question the future of traditional middle managers, according to a top Goldman Sachs Group Inc. executive.
“When our young folks now start work, they’re managing agents,” Kevin Sneader, Goldman’s president of Asia Pacific ex-Japan, said Thursday at the Milken Institute Asia Summit in Singapore. “They have to make the most of this virtual army that they’ve now got.”
The shift threatens to upend the traditional career path, where analysts spend years running financial models and building presentations before taking on management responsibilities. Figuring out how to redeploy existing middle managers will mark a “generational challenge for many, many segments,” he said.
Rather than fretting over mass job losses due to the technology, Sneader and others speaking on a panel about AI and finance focused on how technology is changing everyday roles.
Across the financial industry, thousands of jobs are set to be upended as AI changes the kind of roles that will be available in future. At Goldman, President John Waldron, who’s viewed as the firm’s next leader, has described the bank’s operations as a “human assembly line” ripe for automation.
“That management task no longer sits with the middle manager; it sits with the front line,” Sneader said at the conference. “We don’t quite know what’s going to happen to that group.”
Sandra Peterson, an operating partner at investment firm Clayton, Dubilier & Rice, said the traditional career ladder may not survive.
“It used to be that professional service firms were pyramids,” she said. “You’d show up, and you know, you march your way through, and if you survived, you got to the next level, the next level, the next level.”
She also said that with AI doing much of the grunt work, it isn’t clear firms would need as many entry level positions.
Singapore’s financial regulator is seeing a similar shift.
Operations staff will need to become managers and supervisors of AI agents, Chia Der Jiun, managing director of the Monetary Authority of Singapore, said at the same panel. Banks will also need fewer fresh graduates for analysis and preparatory work, he said.
The city-state has been preparing for these changes through training bank staff in AI skills as well as working with the universities to ensure its graduates are ready for the new world, Chia said.
Singapore’s Finance Firms to Train 80,000 Staff in AI Skills
For young people however, Sneader said the upside goes beyond angling for a finance job.
“There’s never been a better time to be an entrepreneur to create something,” he said, noting that fewer resources are needed to start a business nowadays. “That’s quite an exciting part of the future when we’re all spending too much time, perhaps worrying about the old world.