Goldman hiring – Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon said the bank’s out-of-school hiring may “contract a little” over the next three years as AI changes how work is done, while the firm still plans to hire thousands of interns and recent graduates.
For years, Goldman Sachs has hired waves of interns and new graduates to learn the rhythms of finance. Now, the CEO is signaling that the first wave may be slightly smaller.
In an interview with Bloomberg’s “Odd Lots” podcast. released on Thursday. David Solomon said the firm’s out-of-school hiring could “contract a little” over the next three years as AI reshapes the work and the skills needed to do it. He insisted the change would not be dramatic. “You’re going to see nuanced changes that probably to some degree reduce the number of people that we start with over the next few years. but probably not what you and I would call dramatically. ” Solomon said. “We’re still going to hire a lot of people out of school.”.
He pegged this year’s intern intake at an estimated 2,400 to 2,500. Solomon also said Goldman has a similar number of permanent new hires starting in July—roughly in line with pre-COVID levels, but below the more than 3,000 it brought in during 2021.
The CEO’s comments land amid a broader argument about what AI means for entry-level work. In Silicon Valley, top AI executives have warned that early-career jobs could be wiped out. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has warned of potential wipe-outs for entry-level workers. Leaders in other industries have pushed back with a more measured view. Apollo’s chief economist Torsten Sløk wrote that there is “zero evidence” that AI is driving layoffs. Uber’s COO, Andrew Macdonald, said it’s getting harder to justify the spending required to automate tasks with AI.
Solomon placed himself firmly in the camp arguing for nuance. He said in a late-May New York Times op-ed that the “AI jobs apocalypse” is overblown.
But the hard part, he said during the podcast, isn’t simply job counts—it’s training. When AI can instantly produce answers that once took hours of less glamorous work, new hires arrive into a different learning environment. Solomon framed it as a challenge of development, not replacement.
He recalled beginning his banking career in an era without minute-by-minute digital trackers for stock prices. To compare stock performance. he said he dug through microfiche. pulled prices from The Wall Street Journal. plotted them on graph paper. and did the math by hand. It was slow, but he argued it built critical thinking skills.
“Now, if you ask for it, you get it instantaneously,” Solomon said. “Has your brain really absorbed what’s actually happening?”
Goldman’s shift toward engineering talent is already part of that picture. Solomon said the firm had shifted more heavily toward engineering talent over the past decade, and that the mix would likely shift again “given the power of these tools and our ability to code.”
Even with that evolution. Solomon’s guidance to young bankers leaned on something older than any model: pick up the phone. “A telephone call to someone is 10 times more valuable than a text or an email,” he said. Solomon added a brief personal caveat: “My daughter says that’s an unverified statistic. I know that’s true.”.
Goldman did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
Goldman Sachs David Solomon AI hiring interns entry-level jobs engineering talent podcast Odd Lots