Goldman CEO says the bank's entry-level hiring may 'contract a little' as AI changes the talent mix

David Solomon, Goldman Sachs' chief executive, has informed the world that entry-level hiring might 'contract a little' over the coming three years, because AI is changing the 'talent mix'. That phrase 'contract a little' is doing an awful lot of heavy lifting, isn't it? One imagines the boardroom wielding a bonsai shear and describing the coming axework as 'slightly defoliating the junior branch'.

'Talent mix' is the other little gem. Because what that really means is: we've decided that the bright-eyed economics graduates who used to build spreadsheets until 3am can now be replaced by a model that does it in 0.4 seconds. Never mind that those same graduates were the pipeline for managing directors in 15 years. The logic runs: why hire humans when you can hire GPUs? Goldman has been investing heavily in machine learning, and now the squeeze on the bottom of the funnel begins. The three-year timeline is clever—it lets the announcement land without immediate protest, and by the time the 'contraction' becomes visible, everyone will have accepted it as inevitable.

What's truly glorious is the framing. Solomon isn't announcing layoffs—oh no, that would be brutal. He's merely saying the hiring rate might 'contract a little'. It's the financial equivalent of telling someone you're only going to break their little finger, not their whole arm. The juniors, the trainees, the new graduates—they're the first to feel the chill. And as the bank's talent mix shifts from human to algorithmic, one has to wonder: who's going to train the AIs? Oh, right. The juniors we didn't hire.