Last month, more than 100 young wealthy founders, inheritors, and industry leaders flew in from all around the world in the luxe mountain town of Aspen, Colo. At Goldman Sachs’ annual At the Helm event, the bank’s affluent clients dropped and did pushups for a Navy SEAL, unfurled their relationship with wealth guru Sahil Bloom, and strategized legacy with Mindy Kaling. But one of the most buzzy endeavors was addressing the elephant in the room: artificial intelligence.
AI is on everyone’s mind—from the desk worker hand-wringing over their role becoming automated, to the tech CEO trying to keep up with their competitors. It’s a $280 billion industry that’s boosted leaders like Anthropic’s Dario Amodei to billion-dollar net worths, and is completely upending the way we move through our professional and personal lives. So, of course, wealthy clientele attending Goldman Sachs’ annual summit were all ears. The attendees—thirty- and forty-somethings who are members of the bank’s Private Wealth Management (PWM) division, which boasts an average account size of over $75 million—gathered to hash out their anxiety and excitement.
Over the course of the three-day summit, attendees and Goldman leaders talked all things AI—from the most lucrative investments, to the tech’s impact on the environment, and its potential to innovate industries. But alongside discussion of the hottest AI startups and new breakthroughs, Goldman Sachs had to set the record straight on one question. Despite OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg drawing comparisons to the dot-com boom, the $238 billion bank said that we’re not in an AI bubble.
“We did have a conversation about markets and whether or not we think we’re in a bubble,” Brittany Boals Moeller, region head of Goldman Sachs’ San Francisco PWM division, tells Fortune. “We do not think we’re in a bubble, and we pay very close attention to that.”
“Will there be some winners and losers from AI? Absolutely. There will definitely be some places where valuations are overblown, and time will tell where those spaces are. So it’s smart for clients to be diligent about how they’re investing in AI.”
How Goldman Sachs’ wealthy clientele are approaching AI
At the Helm attendees had a lot to say about AI. The group, mainly millennials and young Gen Xers, grew up in the internet era and recognize how technology can switch up the status quo. Boals Moeller says the recent AI breakthrough is no different. Clients are clued in on the technology, from how to effectively prompt chatbots, to what companies are making waves.
“This is a group of early adopters, high-energy tech-enabled people, and so the discussion around AI in general was very positive,” she explains. “I’m sure that there are some who have concerns about directionally where it goes. But there were a lot of people who were very excited about the innovation.”
There were a few areas of AI that particularly piqued their interests: the tech’s implications on healthcare, personal productivity, and energy use. In medicine, AI is already being put to good use. The tech can interpret brain scans twice as accurately as professionals examining stroke patients, spot more bone fractures than humans can, and detect early signs of more than 1,000 diseases. And when it comes to productivity, many see boundless opportunities. People are using AI to automate their mundane work responsibilities, plan out vacation getaways, and get through a pile of emails. In the office, McKinsey found that long-term AI use in corporate cases could drive $4.4 trillion in added productivity growth.
All of these complex language models need to be powered, and At the Helm millionaires were well aware of the energy drain. It’s projected that in just three years, more than half of the electricity going to data centers will be used for AI, according to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. By 2028, AI alone could gobble up the same amount of electricity it takes to power 22% of all U.S. households. Boals Moeller says attendees are concerned about the environment impacts, but also how they can invest in AI-related energy the right way.
“Energy did come up in the context of AI quite a bit as an interesting investment opportunity for clients, and also to balance that with the social issues about energy [as] a finite resource,” Boals Moeller continues, adding that it’s a way to access AI’s value creation from a “tangential” place. “How do we really think about that responsibly relative to the energy needs?”
AI is also undoubtedly one of the biggest investment opportunities of this century. And with Goldman Sachs’ PWM clients boasting anything from $10 million to $1 billion in assets, they’re flush with cash to go all-in on the right opportunity. Nvidia stock has been labeled a “millionaire-maker,” and Adobe’s aggressive adoption of AI tools made it a standout long-term play for investors. The event’s attendees want in on the action, too.
“People were excited to be closer to [the technology],” Boals Moeller says.
