Santiago Pardo Sanchez

Solomon, Goldman’s chief since 2018, also spoke about the impact AI would have on his company’s businesses and those of his clients.

The bank now has 11,000 engineers among its 46,000 employees, according to Solomon, and is using AI to help draft public filing documents.

The work of drafting an S1 — the initial registration prospectus for an IPO — might have taken a six-person team two weeks to complete, but it can now be 95 per cent done by AI in minutes, said Solomon.

“The last 5 per cent now matters because the rest is now a commodity,” he said.

Excerpt from “Goldman Sachs chief David Solomon questions start-ups’ need to list” in the Financial Times

This could be pure Solomon bravado, but his last comment is worth thinking about. If 5% of the S1 matters now, then why do the remaining 95%? If we are entering a world where AI can do the rote documentation for one side and AI can read and process that same rote documentation for the other side, then why is that documentation needed?

A big impact of AI in the workplace will be its role in exposing how much of our work is performative and unnecessary. Those people will lose their job, but were those jobs even needed? Were they good jobs? Were the people in those jobs fulfilled?

AI is going to make us more human, because we will be able to automate the automatable drudge and more workers will become true knowledge workers.