Goldman CIO Marco Argenti on the Warp-Speed Improvements in AI

Marco Argenti (0:02)

Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news.

Tracy Alloway (0:18)

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:21)

And I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (0:23)

Joe, the thing about AI, I feel like it's accelerated all of our timelines, right? Like it's phenomenal to me to think back that like back to the days of ChatGPT, and when did that come out? 2020?

Joe Weisenthal (0:36)

Late 2022

Tracy Alloway (0:37)

2022

Joe Weisenthal (0:38)

November 2022

Tracy Alloway (0:39)

That's just crazy to think.

Joe Weisenthal (0:41)

It's really unbelievable, the gap, and I've been thinking about this, like just A, the explosion of capabilities.

Tracy Alloway (0:48)

Yeah.

Joe Weisenthal (0:49)

And the thing I've been thinking about is that, you know, after the first year or so when it came out, we talked to executives, and we were like, how are you using AI in your workflow? They're like, well, everyone's experimenting. It's great. Everyone is using ChatGPT. It's always very vague. And now in 2026, the story is that AI is so powerful that it's going to destroy all these legacy software companies. So what I would say is we must be past the age of experimentation. I think that any company using it better have some example of like, here is a workflow where we're using it.

Tracy Alloway (1:19)

Well, exactly. And to this point, now that we're past the age of experimentation, I'm very curious how executives and managers are actually evaluating the return on investment in AI and what they actually want to see from it at this point. So are you going to replace all your third-party SaaS contractors with internal coders? And what does that look like from an actual headcount perspective, from a cost savings perspective? We can actually get some concrete details on this now. So I'm very excited to say we do, in fact, have the perfect guest, someone who we had on before to talk generally about AI and someone at a company that has been doing, you know, they got into it pretty fast. The last time we spoke to this person was in 2024 And even since then, Ages ago. I guess it just feels like light years in AI time.

Joe Weisenthal (2:11)

So just one last thing on the last few years of AI, which is that when Shadgy BT, I used, when it came out, I played around with it a lot when I had to write poems and all this stuff. And then I bet if you actually looked at my AI usage, you went through a trough. Whereas like I wasn't really getting any productivity, there was nothing it really could do that I needed. It still sort of seemed like a toy. So I had this like intense burst of views for the first several months and then this trough. And now these days with the expansion of capabilities, particularly Claude Code, I'm finding all kinds of new things. So there is like, we're out coming out of the trough. I think a lot of people are actually finding things, at least if I can generalize from my own experience.

Tracy Alloway (2:49)

Yeah, absolutely. So we do in fact have the perfect guest. We've brought back Marco Argenti. He is of course the Chief Information Officer over at Goldman Sachs, someone we had on the podcast back in August of 2024 So Marco, thank you so much for coming back on.

Marco Argenti (3:04)

Tracy, thank you for having me.

Tracy Alloway (3:06)

How much have things changed for you? Does 2024 seem like 20 years ago now in AI time?

Marco Argenti (3:12)

Yeah, I barely remember even what happened back there.

Tracy Alloway (3:16)

That's a nice way of saying you forgot what we talked about on the podcast.

Marco Argenti (3:19)

That's fine. But literally, things are really changing on a weekly basis almost right now. And if I look at the evolution not only since a year ago, but even since six months ago, I think it has been nothing short than a revolutionary. A year ago, we barely talked about agents or the word almost didn't exist. We were using AIs like a chat companion.

Tracy Alloway (3:42)

Yeah, a search function.

Marco Argenti (3:44)

Yeah, it was telling you, oh, I'm sorry, I don't know who's the president of the United States because my cutoff date is like a year and a half before, or things of that nature. Now you can say, hey, as a person, you can say, hey, my plan just got canceled and it's going to redo all your plans, it's going to check for available flights, it's going to do all these capabilities of personal assistant, and that translates in corporations also in a lot of utility that you can see in everyday tasks. So I would say what I like to say to my people, but also in general, I say, this is not a drill, this is real. It's not the age of experimentation anymore. There's a tool that now can do a lot for you. And so we put it to work, and we put it to work starting from developers, but not expanding in many, many other areas. So I would say actually, if I look at the increase of capabilities of these models, what we've seen in the last six months or so, with really the evolution of this advanced reasoning capabilities that came out, I think that finally got us the confidence that you can use AIs for everyday's work with the right supervision and also in many cases for mission critical applications. It's not a toy anymore. It's something that you can expect results from. And I think that's the biggest change. So today, I would say that there is almost nobody in Goldman that is not touched in a way or another by AIs. We gave our GSAI or GSAI assistant to 47,000 people. Most of them use it every day. Most of them use it multiple times a day. And what's interesting is it's like the first time you see a tool like, I don't know, Microsoft Excel, you can almost not predict what people are going to do with that. Okay, maybe it's born for doing some form of accounting, and then people write entire applications on top of that or use it for project managers, management or things of that nature. And AI is kind of turning that way. If I look at what people do with that, it's really things that surprises every day because...