Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon on Running a Bank in the Age of AI

**Tracy Alloway** (0:00)
Hey there, Odd Lots listeners. We are very excited to announce that we're going to be heading to Hong Kong for a very special live event.

**Joe Weisenthal** (0:07)
That's right. I love Hong Kong. I'm super excited. I haven't been there since 2018
I'm very excited. We're going to be doing one of our trivia nights while we're in town.

**Tracy Alloway** (0:16)
One of our pub quizzes.

**Joe Weisenthal** (0:17)
That's right.

**Tracy Alloway** (0:18)
This one is going to be held on the evening of June 11th. We are starting the actual quiz at 6:30 PM, and it's going to be at Soho House.

**Joe Weisenthal** (0:28)
That's right. If you would love to prove your knowledge of all things markets, finance, and economics, if you want to meet myself and Tracy, if you want to hang out with fellow listeners, please, we'd love to see you at our Odd Lots Trivia Night on June 11th in Hong Kong at Soho House Hong Kong. You can find tickets. Go to bloomberg.com/oddlots. You'll find a link there to our live event, and you can come purchase tickets.
Just 400 Hong Kong dollars. I assume that's a good price.

**Tracy Alloway** (0:57)
It's a bargain, and we hope to see you there.

**SPEAKER_4** (1:05)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news.

**Tracy Alloway** (1:20)
Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.

**Joe Weisenthal** (1:24)
And I'm Joe Weisenthal.

**Tracy Alloway** (1:26)
So Joe, when we talk about AI, and its impact on jobs and businesses, one of the things we like to do, or one of the prisms through which we like to explore AI is through banks.

**Joe Weisenthal** (1:38)
Absolutely.

**Tracy Alloway** (1:39)
So you think about banks, they've got big tech budgets. They're talking to AI companies all the time. They're their clients, essentially. So they're deploying a lot of this technology. And then they have this whole array of jobs, right? You have the classic sort of process workers in the back office.

**Joe Weisenthal** (1:56)
Yes.

**Tracy Alloway** (1:56)
You've got the junior analysts who are churning out PowerPoints, but you also have bankers in IB who are doing more, I guess, relationship driven business. So you have this really good cross section of the sort of white collar jobs that people think about when we think about AI disruption.

**Joe Weisenthal** (2:13)
Do you remember in the 2010s when every bank CEO is like, you know, we actually like to think of ourselves as a tech company.

**Tracy Alloway** (2:19)
I remember.

**Joe Weisenthal** (2:20)
That was a fun little...

**Tracy Alloway** (2:21)
Bring in the ping pong tables for the engineers. That's right.

**Joe Weisenthal** (2:24)
That was a fun little era, but no, you're absolutely right. And of course, you know, AI is largely expected, at least until we have much more advanced robotics, expect to affect white collar labor first. You mentioned the whole range, but there are aspects of when I think about being a banker, work in a bank that, to your point, really do feel like relationships. And like, there's the cliché is like go out and golf, but I think they do actually golf a lot. They think that is part of the business.

**Tracy Alloway** (2:49)
All right, well, we'll find out. We have spoken to Marco Argenti at Goldman Sachs before. He's the CTO about how the bank is actually deploying technology. But today we have an even more more perfect guest.

**Joe Weisenthal** (3:01)
We have the perfect guest.

**Tracy Alloway** (3:01)
If that's possible. We're going to be speaking, of course, to David Solomon. He's the CEO and chairman of Goldman Sachs. And he just penned an op-ed in The New York Times with the headline, I'm the CEO of Goldman Sachs, The AI Job Apocalypse is Overblown. So truly the perfect guest to talk about all of this. David, thanks for coming on Odd Lots.

**David Solomon** (3:21)
Thank you for having me. I'm delighted to be with you guys.

**Tracy Alloway** (3:23)
Congrats on the op-ed. You're in the media industry now.

**David Solomon** (3:26)
Well, I'm trying not to be in the media industry.
I'm glad I wrote the op-ed. By the way, not my title, The New York Times title. But I'm glad I wrote the op-ed.

**Tracy Alloway** (3:35)
Why did you write it?

**David Solomon** (3:36)
Well, I wrote the op-ed. I haven't written a lot of op-eds. I think in my eight years, I've written two. And the last one was back in 2019 before COVID. And it was around energy, where I was trying to talk about the fact that I thought there was gonna be real change in the context of the energy supply chain. And it was very important that we made investments in things that were greener, and we moved in that direction. But I also stated at the time, and took a little heat for this very emphatically, that oil and gas was gonna be a significant part of the energy supply chain for decades to come. And Goldman Sachs would be financing fossil fuel companies for a long, long time. And in looking at the lens now, I think that it is very important that we have a thoughtful and detailed discussion about the change that's going on. And let's just start, if you don't mind, if I can step back. I am hugely, hugely optimistic about this technology and the impact that this technology can have on large scale enterprises like Goldman Sachs and the productivity gains that it can create, which I do believe can increase economic growth, create more prosperity and more impact on our economic system broadly in a very, very positive way. I am hugely optimistic. And I think about things in five to 10 year time bites. Like what should we expect to see over the next 10 years? That's the way I think about things.