Goldman Sachs staff use their AI tools more than Citi colleagues

With banks spending exorbitant amounts of money on building their AI infrastructure, it helps to know that their employees are actually using it. Goldman Sachs released usage statistics of its AI-assistant platform, suggesting that tens of thousands of prompts are made by Goldman's bankers, traders and engineers each day.

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Goldman Sachs COO John Waldron, speaking at the Bernstein Strategic Decisions Conference last week, said that the bank had onboarded 40,000 staff to its AI platform, "which is darn near all of our employees." Last month, Waldron said they wrote a collective 2 million prompts. Usage has doubled over the past year; in July, Goldman staff averaged one million prompts per month.

This seems like a lot at first glance, but Goldman's current AI usage equates to just 1.7 prompts per employee per day. It's more than Citi employees, who created roughly one prompt per day in Q1 of this year using the bank's AI tools. Citi has over 5 times the total number of employees though, and employs more people in less technical roles like customer service.

Waldron said at the conference that Goldman is equally focused on "pushing hard to increase the literacy level" of staff, and said Goldman is "doing a lot of work teaching people, including myself, how to be a better prompter." This is done through the bank's 'digital advocacy' team, which is responsible for "driving [AI] adoption, developing and delivering training, and owning communications," according to open job listings. There are three openings available, based across Dallas and New York, all of which are focused on Goldman's asset management arm.

Citi's process is different. It has a team of over 4,000 'AI accelerators' who work on spreading AI awareness in the bank independently from their actual job. There are also ~30 AI 'champions' who lead this effort for specific business lines. Other banks (and some hedge funds) often hire AI consultants to teach them how to prompt; this can earn you up to $12k per day, while associates in Goldman's digital advocacy teams are offered salaries of up to $160k in New York.

Some teams are using the tech more than others. Waldron highlighted that, in Goldman's tech teams, there has been a 20% productivity increase broadly across the organization "but in some discrete cases, it's materially better than that."

Goldman Sachs and Citi staff still seem to be just dipping their toes into the water when it comes to AI. The same cannot be said of certain big tech firms who may be feeling some remorse for their rush to get their staff to use AI. Amazon had an internal leaderboard tracking AI usage, but had taken it down after employees used it for superfluous actions to boost their scores at the expense of Amazon. Uber, meanwhile, is rumored to have burned through its entire AI coding tools budget in just four months. 

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