Half of the 46,000 employees at Goldman Sachs now have access to artificial intelligence. By the end of this year, chief information officer Marco Argenti expects even more will be able to tap into AI in hopes of boosting their productivity—yet still not everyone at the firm.
“We have the entire organization that needs to somehow re-tune and re-tool itself for AI,” says Argenti. “But, I think we’ve been very, very, very intentional with regards to driving people change management.”
The measured approach at Goldman Sachs, ranked No. 35 on the Fortune 500, reflects Argenti’s view that AI technology is rapidly evolving and still comes with a lot of uncertainty. Goldman’s AI steering group and risk and control teams work to determine which of the dozens of AI proposals should be tackled and how that can be done responsibly.
One example is the experimentation Goldman is doing with agentic AI, which still isn’t fully deployed. AI agents are meant to work autonomously or with little human oversight, performing multi-step reasoning or task completion. These agents could, theoretically, perform compliance checks or help process customer transactions. But the AI agents also need specific training and can hallucinate, resulting in errors in the results they produce. Goldman says it is still assessing what additional controls it needs to effectively and safely use agentic AI.
Because Goldman operates in a highly regulated sector, the industry historically prefers to build technology in-house, giving these institutions more control to protect sensitive customer financial data. That’s changed with the rise of cloud, and more recently generative AI, and a vast majority of financial institutions have deployed at least one generative AI product, frequently partnering with external vendors.
Roughly one out of every four Goldman Sachs employees is an engineer, and this group was the first Argenti targeted when deploying generative AI tools. Argenti gave those workers access to AI coding assistant tools, including GitHub Copilot and Gemini Code Assist. Goldman has conducted competitions inspired by reality TV entrepreneurial competition show Shark Tank so that developers could share their most creative uses of AI.
Argenti measures the return on investment from these copilot tools in a few ways, including frequency of use and the acceptance rate of code generated by GitHub and similar tools.
Broader use of generative AI within the company came with the launch of GS AI Assistant, which rolled out last year and has expanded to 10,000 employees including bankers, traders, and asset managers. This tool, which Goldman anticipates will be available to nearly all employees by the end of 2025, can summarize documents, draft emails, analyze data, and create personalized content.
GS AI Assistant was built to be multi-modal, utilizing large language models from Gemini, OpenAI and Llama, with Argenti exploring adding LLMs from other AI hyperscalers. Argenti says he doesn’t want to rely on just one vendor and is giving the firm the flexibility to use a model that may be better for coding, while a rival offering is stronger at reasoning. Goldman also factors in how easy the LLMs are to modify and how expensive they are to run.
“All of those considerations got us to the point where we want to continue to plug-and-play with those models,” says Argenti.
For workers not in engineering, Goldman is tracking usage rates and sends out surveys to get feedback to make continued improvements to GS AI Assistant. The company has sought to promote champions from asset and wealth management, private banking, and trading—not the technologists—to get buy-in. “People might be afraid or skeptical when you drive technology first,” says Argenti.
Argenti joined the firm as a partner and co-CIO in 2019 and fully took on the role in 2022 after his co-CIO, George Lee, became co-head of the geopolitical and technology insights arm Goldman Sachs Global Institute. Prior to joining Goldman, Argenti was vice president of technology at Amazon Web Services for six years and also held leadership roles at telecommunications company Nokia.
A lot of his earlier work at Goldman focused on enabling the firm’s employees to work from home as a result of the global pandemic. But he also wanted to shift the culture of engineering to be less like how a bank thinks about technology, which tended to favor creating bespoke solutions for each separate division, and more like a tech giant that creates one tool to be shared across the firm.
This newer way of thinking is reflected in the open-source data management and governance platform Legend, which publicly launched in 2020. Goldman built Legend internally over 10 years prior to the public launch, giving both technologists and non-technical users the ability to develop data-centered applications and derive insights from that data.
Data is a key component of Argenti’s AI strategy, which he calls a three-leg stool that should also represent the AI technology itself and the people who use it. Good quality data is needed for the right output from LLMs, but changing people’s behavior is equally important.
“It’s about amplifying capabilities and in the hands of the best people, I think you’re going to get the best results,” says Argenti.
John Kell
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NEWS PACKETS
Google plans $32 billion acquisition of Wiz. Google’s parent company Alphabet on Tuesday agreed to buy cybersecurity startup Wiz, an acquisition that will help bolster the tech giant’s cloud computing business with improved security features. The purchase price is $9 billion more than the $23 billion that was floated last year when the pair first started discussing a deal, which Wiz ultimately turned down because it said it wanted to focus on an initial public offering. More money proved to be too enticing, and the Google-Wiz deal now represents a test for Big Tech and the new Trump administration’s regulatory view on the mergers within the sector.
Nvidia debuts new AI chips. CEO Jensen Huang unveiled new chips including Blackwell Ultra, which will ship later in 2025, and Vera Rubin, the company’s next-generation graphics processing unit that is expected to ship next year. The announcements came at Nvidia’s GTC conference, which is expected to have 25,000 attendees and hundreds of companies discussing how they use Nvidia’s hardware for AI. They included General Motors, which announced it will rely on Nvidia for its self-driving vehicles. Bloomberg notes that a mere mention of customers like Dell Technologies and Synopsys gave their stock prices a lift, but GM didn’t experience the same trading boost this year.
Computer-programmer employment drops to its lowest level since 1980. The number of computer programming jobs—which peaked above 700,000 during the dot-come boom of the early 2000s—has reached its lowest level in over four decades, a drop that more recently correlates with the introduction of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Generative AI tools can help automate coding tasks, presenting a direct challenge to the work that computer programmers do writing, modifying, and testing code. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has projected a nearly 10% drop in computer programming employment opportunities from 2023 to 2033.
What’s next for Intel’s new CEO. A little over three months after Intel’s board ousted Pat Gelsinger as CEO, Lip-Bu Tan has been named as his successor and is expected to consider “significant” changes to its chip manufacturing methods and AI strategies, according to Reuters, in what’s been described as a sweeping effort to revive the ailing chipmaker. Some reported changes include a structured approach to AI and staffing cuts that would likely be aimed at the middle management layer that Tan views as overstuffed. Tan—who purchased $25 million in Intel stock to prove he has a vested interest in a turnaround—in the near term will focus on aggressively courting new customers for the company’s manufacturing arm, which makes chips for companies like Microsoft and Amazon.
ADOPTION CURVE
AI-fueled career paths are embraced by the vast majority of engineers. Engineers are strongly prioritizing AI-enabled career paths, with four out of five saying they either prefer to work for a company that prioritizes AI integration or actively seek out jobs that do so, according to a TE Connectivity-backed survey of 1,000 engineers and executives who work in a variety of industries including automotive, industrial machinery, cloud computing and AI.
The survey also found that 42% of executives say they aren’t providing AI training programs and the top reason given was the cost of implementing those training programs and uncertainty about the return on investment. That may also be why less than a quarter of respondents across the five countries in the survey—the U.S., China, Germany, India, and Japan—report “extensive” adoption of AI within their companies.
JOBS RADAR
Hiring:
- Tanium is seeking a CIO, based in New York City. Posted salary range: $160K-$475K/year.
- The Office of the Minnesota Secretary of State is seeking a CIO, based in the greater Minneapolis-St. Paul region. Posted salary range: $124.6K-$178.3K/year.
- Howard University is seeking a CTO for the school’s University Affiliated Research Center, based in the Washington-Baltimore region. Posted salary range: $190.9K-$210K/year.
- MetroPlusHealth is seeking a deputy CTO, based in New York City. Posted salary range: $295K-$315K/year.
Hired:
- Coalition announced Maha Virudhagiri as the first-ever CTO for the cyber insurance provider, where he will oversee engineering, IT, and AI and the overall technology strategy. Prior to joining Coalition, Virudhagiri was engineering, design, and product lead at Tesla and held leadership roles at Ancestry and Walmart Labs.
- Brightly Software appointed Wendy Frazier to CTO, joining the company after a 25-year tenure at The Weather Company, where she was most recently CTO. Frazier has also served as a board member of Women in Technology since 2017. Brightly, a cloud-based asset and maintenance management software provider, was acquired by German conglomerate Siemens for $1.6 billion in 2022.
- The Mutual Group appointed Vineet Bansal as chief information and technology officer, where he will oversee the insurance services provider’s tech platform, enterprise applications, cybersecurity, and IT strategy. He joins from home warranty plan provider Oncourse Home Solutions, where he also served as CITO, and also held C-suite roles at Intact Specialty Insurance and IptiQ, a subsidiary of Swiss Re.
- Bespin Global named David Ting as CTO to oversee the AI strategy for the cloud management and consulting firm. He was previously CTO at eyewear manufacturer Zenni Optical and as chief information security officer at software developer Nylas.
- Claroty promoted Amir Preminger to CTO, to oversee innovation and the industrial cybersecurity company’s research group Team82. Preminger initially joined Claroty in 2016 as a researcher and was most recently VP of research. Prior to joining Claroty, he spent nine years in the research and development of advanced cyber solutions for the Israel Defense Force.
- Affinity appointed Rebecca Campbell as CTO, joining the software developer that serves private equity and other financial firms. Campbell joins from visual collaboration software provider Mural, where she was SVP of engineering. Campbell also co-founded her own startup Caregiven, which was sold in 2022, and served as VP of software engineering at software company New Relic.
- Cognyte Software named Ronny Lempel as CTO, joining the investigative analytics software company after co-founding a startup called GreenMules, which shut down in 2024. Lempel was also previously director of engineering at Google and led research and technology initiatives at Microsoft Azure, Outbrain, and Yahoo.
- 374Water announced Raj Melkote as CTO, where he will lead and build the engineering organization for the waste treatment technology provider. Prior to joining 374Water, Melkote was CTO at BayoTech Hydrogen where he led innovation, testing, and design. He was also VP of engineering at manufacturer Edwards Vacuum.
- Lilt hired Werner Koepf as chief product and technology officer. He joins the AI-enabled translation software provider after most recently serving as SVP of engineering at software company Karat. Koepf previously held leadership roles at Ticketmaster, Expedia, and Amazon.