Goldman Sachs has long served as a fever dream for aspirational finance students. In 2025, the bank received a record number of 360,000 internship applications, with less than 1% of the students accepted, Fortune reported.

After dominating the global Initial Public Offering market for almost a century, the age of artificial intelligence has prompted Goldman Sachs to reflect on the human experience to maintain its edge. Flashy resumes are for the past, and human interaction is in, as Goldman Sachs is recruiting employees that can’t be automated away; those with creativity and good judgement.

“Experience is hugely underrated and a big differentiator for the firm,” Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon told the Long Strange Trip Podcast. “Experience matters in these big organizations and you’ve got to make difficult judgments.”

Reflecting on this new focus,Associate Professor of Management at Baruch College Paul Bailo, emphasized the changing role of education.

“Education is about the growth of the human mind to gain more experience. The purpose of education is to innovate, create, and help mankind,” Bailo told The Ticker.

Following his work as an executive advisor to Goldman Sachs, Bailo founded his own startup, Landit.AI, which prepares students for job interviews.

“We built an algorithm that tracks 28 different emotions over time and trains people to look happier,” Bailo said.

As opposed to raw quantitative skills, Goldman Sachs is increasingly interested in bankers who can cultivate real relationships with clients and close more deals.

In analyzing this changing philosophy, Ricardo Merino, a junior at Baruch and former Goldman Sachs intern, discussed the bank’s “Three Conversations” framework.

“When they talk about our productivity, they are usually looking for three things: technical excellence, commercial instinct and team impact,” Merino told The Ticker.

“Managers didn’t just look at the clock, they looked at your reliability and the precision of the work you were submitting.”

This framework reveals a new expectation at Goldman Sachs: that junior staff should be more productive and creative than AI models.

Despite AI’s growing use, investment banking hours remain long, with many junior staff still working 90-hour weeks. When considering the impacts of this productivity culture, Bailo warned, “There has to be more than money in the loyalty equation. Goldman Sachs is essentially buying the loyalty of its employees.”

As AI advances, most repetitive tasks in finance have already been automated.

“Solomon is talking about your capacity to review what AI has done and make judgments. In the past, that was the role of managers, but now that is the role of junior staff,” Pauline Argenson, president of the Academy of Finance, said.

Despite some job cuts, Goldman Sachs still added more than 1,800 new employees just last year.

In her book “Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street,” Anthropologist Karen Ho interviewed Andrew Wong, former vice president at Goldman Sachs, about the firm’s values.

“When we look for an analyst, we always look for the people with the best grades, the most confident people in an interview, not necessarily the people you think are going to be the best analysts, but people who will be good senior bankers,” Wong said.

With the challenging nature of AI, Goldman Sachs continues to change the way of operations, to receive help from AI, but continues to have human contact.

“I believe that Goldman Sachs is going to use AI, not be replaced by it,” Argenson said.