It’s already becoming clear how AI will impact coding, law and medicine, but it turns out it’ll impact investment banking as well.
Goldman Sachs has said that it’s using AI to create paperwork for IPOs for clients, and is seeing some impressive performance gains. David Solomon, Goldman Sachs’ CEO told FT that that the company has been using AI to draft the S1 documents, which is the initial registration prospectus for an IPO in the US. The S1 and related forms can run into many dozen pages, but he says AI is helping draft them nearly instantly.
Solomon said that the work to draft an S1 usually took six Goldman Sachs human around two weeks to complete. AI, however, is able to do 95 percent of the work in “minutes”. “The last 5 per cent now matters, because the rest is now a commodity,” he said.
It’s quite remarkable that AI is able to complete 95 percent of the work in minutes, as opposed to the 84 man-days it required earlier. Also, this is fairly sophisticated work — Goldman Sachs employs some of the best minds in the world, and pays them some of the highest salaries across sectors. But it appears that AI can now do much of their work instantly, and for nearly free.
This is a story that’s repeating itself across white-collar professions. Coding platforms like Cursor and Copilot are helping software developers write code much faster than they were previously able to. Lawyers too are doing much of their paperwork and case-drafting with the help of AI. Copywriters are writing real-world copies with AI, and while AI hasn’t yet been deployed in medicine, there are studies that suggest that it’s already beating human doctors at diagnosis.
All this could line up to create the perfect storm for white-collar jobs in the coming years. AI is already better than most human programmers, doctors and lawyers, and will only get better with time. New approaches like AI agents will increasingly reduce the human involvement that’s currently required to use AI. And with each white-collar worker being exponentially more productive thanks to AI, the number of white-collar jobs could dramatically fall in the coming years. There will be newer jobs and roles that’ll be created, but the world’s white-collar workforce would do well to buckle their seatbelts and prepare for the upcoming AI revolution.