The owner of one of the most important investment funds in the world, billionaire Ken Griffin, confessed during an interview at Stanford, that he recently returned home on a Friday very “depressed”, because the new artificial intelligence agents that he implemented on a trial basis managed to complete in a couple of hours jobs that normally take weeks for the best experts in the field. people who are generally trained with postgraduate master’s and doctoral studies.
Everything seems to indicate that the intellectual elite of finance, the one that seemed untouchable, has its future work threatened
Automation doesn’t just come for basic jobs
By: Gabriel E. Levy B.
For decades we believed that machines would take over the routine positions, the most mechanical, the cashiers, the administrative ones, the switchboard operators. So-called “blue-collar” jobs, or repetitive office tasks, is basically a comfortable and almost reassuring narrative for those who have invested years of their lives in a graduate degree: studying hard was always the best policy or insurance against technological unemployment, however, that idea is falling apart. And the one who has just pushed it into the void is not an anti-technology activist or an apocalyptic academic.
He is Ken Griffin, the man who runs Citadel, one of the most profitable and aggressive hedge funds in the world, with some 67,000 million dollars under management.
On April 15, during the “Stanford Leadership Forum”, Griffin sat down to talk with Professor Amit Seru in front of more than five hundred people.
Griffin said that he has seen, within Citadel, how AI agents execute tasks in hours or days that would normally take weeks or even months for professionals with master’s and doctorate degrees in finance. And he finished with a phrase that was difficult to digest coming from a billionaire: he said that he had returned home on a Friday “frankly quite depressed”, because he could see the impact that this was going to have on society.
The most curious thing is that Griffin was never an AI evangelist. Quite the opposite. Just a few weeks earlier, in Davos, he described the boom in artificial intelligence as an exaggerated narrative to justify gigantic investments in data centers.
In previous talks with Stanford students, he had even said that Citadel used AI only “a little bit” and that he did not think it was revolutionary.
That is why this turn is important.
When a skeptic gives up, it is necessary to pay attention to him.
Wall Street’s Chorus of Confessions
Griffin is not alone. Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan, admitted to investors in February that the bank has already “displaced people” because of artificial intelligence.
In his annual letter to shareholders, he compared this technology to electricity or the internet.
In Davos he went so far as to say something even stronger and more overwhelming: that he himself would support an eventual government ban on mass layoffs by AI, because sudden unemployment could lead to “civil unrest.”
David Solomon, head of Goldman Sachs, dropped another bombshell at an event held in Palo Alto, California.
He said that AI already writes 95% of an IPO prospectus in a matter of minutes. Before, that same document required two weeks and a team of six bankers working piecemeal.
“The last 5% now matters, because the rest has become a commodity”
Goldman recently cut more than a thousand jobs last year, basically these are professional roles or profiles, which Artificial Intelligence can simply develop more efficiently and of course at a much lower cost.
Larry Fink, captain of BlackRock, also warned that graduates now face the highest unemployment rate in the world, “even without a recession,” because AI is profoundly altering white-collar jobs for profiles that we could call: junior.
Bank of America’s Brian Moynihan reported that by 2026 his bank’s total jobs will decline thanks to the
“operational excellence and the application of new emerging technologies, including of course AI”.
But perhaps the most striking example was recently put on the table: Mary Callahan Erdoes, head of wealth management at JPMorgan.
He revealed that an internal controls process that used to require 200 people reading documents of more than fifty pages, is now done by a system with 80 written orders. His colleague Marianne Lake finished off with a devastating phrase:
“Only the paranoid survive.”
The pyramid is being inverted
For two centuries, automation was always the base. First the looms, then the assembly lines, then the administrative posts. Generative AI does the exact opposite. It goes up.
A study signed by OpenAI together with the University of Pennsylvania stated in 2023: “the highest-paid jobs are the most exposed.”
The International Monetary Fund quantified that 40% of the world’s jobs will be affected by AI, and in advanced economies the figure rises to 60%.
Kristalina Georgieva, the managing director of the IMF, speaks fearlessly of a “tsunami” of jobs and warns that this time the middle class is also trapped.
Citigroup has calculated that 54% of banking jobs have “high automation potential.”
This is the highest percentage of any sector. Bloomberg Intelligence estimates that global banking could lose about 200,000 jobs in the next three to five years, while pre-tax yields would grow by up to 17% thanks to the productivity provided by AI.
Last year, S&P 500 companies cut their aggregate workforce by about 400,000 jobs, the first net drop in nearly a decade.
The junior analyst, an endangered species
Who is most exposed? Just who seemed more armored. The junior investment banking analyst, the one who prepares client presentations, valuations, comparisons and initial due diligence, fits like a glove with what today’s AI does best.
Not surprisingly, OpenAI has recruited more than a hundred former bankers from JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to train a model dubbed Project Mercury.
They are paid $150 an hour to build a financial model a week.
The intention is clear. At Deutsche Bank, its head of technology strategy has already put it bluntly: “The easy idea is to simply replace juniors with an AI tool.”
An anonymous analyst confessed in a specialized forum that his bank had cut the summer promotion by 30% despite registering record levels of activity.
The paradox is brutal. The same technology that depresses the man who uses it to beat the market promises shareholders historic margins.
Both things can be true at the same time. The transition can be, in aggregate, expansive, and at the same time, in the short term, devastating for an entire generation of professionals who took an MBA convinced that their brain was impregnable.
What is new, what even Griffin cannot disguise, is that the first step to fall is not that of the cashier, but that of the analyst who dreamed of becoming a partner.
Who masters AI is more protected
And in the midst of this unprecedented gale of threats, there is a crack that substantially makes the difference with respect to the rest, those who today sit in front of AI, know it, master it, use it and integrate it into their day to day, are not simply learning just another tool. A kind of lifeline is being built, almost without realizing it.
Because if tomorrow the dismissal email arrives, that person does not start from scratch.
He knows how to ask a model to put together a business plan in an afternoon, to write proposals for clients, to design a website without paying an agency, to analyze a market in minutes.
You can set up a consulting firm from your living room, launch a digital product with four connected tools, or sell your packaged knowledge in a thousand different ways.
On the other hand, those who have been looking at AI for years out of the corner of their eye, hoping that it is a passing fad or convinced that their degree shielded them, are going to find themselves with a job market that they no longer understand and, even worse, without the digital crutches that today allow a single person to do the work that a team used to require. The gap that is coming will not only be between those who have jobs and those who do not.
It will be between those who know how to use AI to reinvent themselves quickly and those who will have to learn to do it under pressure, with the clock ticking and the fridge empty.
And that difference, in the coming years, will weigh more than any master’s degree hanging on the wall.
In short: Ken Griffin acknowledged at Stanford that AI already does elite work in hours that took weeks for analysts with master’s and doctorate degrees. Dimon, Solomon, Fink and Moynihan confirm the same from JPMorgan, Goldman, BlackRock and Bank of America. Studies by the IMF and the World Economic Forum confirm that the pyramid is inverted. This time automation starts at the top, not at the bottom.
Finally, the best lifeline is to master AI, also because it allows entrepreneurship in the event of losing one’s job.
References
Bloomberg Intelligence. (2026). Wall Street faces 200,000 job cuts as AI transforms the workforce. Traders Magazine.
CNBC. (2026, February 24). Jamie Dimon says AI is already reshaping JPMorgan Chase’s workforce.
Eloundou, T., Manning, S., Mishkin, P., & Rock, D. (2023). GPTs are GPTs: An early look at the labor market impact potential of large language models. OpenAI and University of Pennsylvania.
International Monetary Fund. (2024). Gen-AI: Artificial intelligence and the future of work. IMF Staff Discussion Note.
World Economic Forum. (2025). Future of Jobs Report 2025. World Economic Forum.
Fortune. (2025, January 17). Goldman Sachs CEO says that AI can draft 95% of an IPO prospectus in minutes.
Fortune. (2026, March 18). BlackRock CEO Larry Fink warns AI is creating a ‘crisis’ for Gen Z workers.
Stanford Graduate School of Business. (2026, April 15). Stanford Leadership Forum: A conversation with Ken Griffin.
