Global investment firm Goldman Sachs is ready to start replacing its employees with AI.

The company announced that it's rolled out a "GS AI assistant" to around 10,000 employees as part of its longer-term effort to introduce AI-powered "employees," as CNBC reports.

Goldman chief information officer Marco Argenti told the broadcaster that the AI assistant will be tasked with summarizing and proofreading emails, as well as translating code between programming languages, for the time being.

"Think about all the tasks that you might want to complete with regards to a variety of use cases for all those professions that can be now at your fingertips," Argenti told CNBC.

The initiative is symptomatic of a larger trend, with banks including JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley doubling down on the use of AI tools.

They frequently frame the experiments as efforts to make their employees' lives easier. But it doesn't take much reading between the lines that leaders are hopeful they'll eventually be able to replace human staffers with AI, especially if Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's recent pronouncements are anything to go by.

Argenti predicts that in a matter of three to five years, AI models could start to erode the lines between humans and AI.

"The AI assistant becomes really like talking to another GS employee," Argenti told CNBC.

How useful the tool will actually prove remains to be seen. AI models have been repeatedly shown to "hallucinate" facts, a glaring problem that engineers are still struggling to eliminate.

AI-based tools have also into a major cybersecurity concern, with companies finding out the hard way that AI chatbots still tend to leak sensitive data.

Despite the tech's well-documented shortcomings and risks, Goldman is doubling down.

"As we progress, the second step is when you’re starting to have this agentic behavior, that is, 'I’m completing a task on behalf of a Goldman employee, and I need to take a set of steps,'" Argenti told CNBC. "That’s where the model is going to start to do things like a Goldman employee, not only say things like a Goldman employee."

Argenti also claimed that the AI would eventually learn how to check its own work, much like a human employee would.

Eventually, as Bloomberg found earlier this year, global investment banks may cut as many as 200,000 jobs thanks to the emergence of competent AI models. Those that involve "routine, repetitive tasks are at risk" will be at particular risk, as Bloomberg Intelligence senior analyst Tomasz Noetzel told the broadcaster.

"But AI will not eliminate them fully, rather it will lead to workforce transformation," he added.

It's a common refrain we've heard tech leaders repeat for years — and Argenti is happy to join the chorus.

"In my opinion, it always boils down to people," he told CNBC. "People are going to make a difference, because people are going to be the ones that actually evolve the AI, educate the AI, empower the AI, and then take action."

More on AI automation: Zuckerberg Announces Plans to Automate Facebook Coding Jobs With AI


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