This Summer’s Interns Are Entering a Very Different Wall Street

Between the time spent squeezing into downtown restaurants and sweating through New York City in business casual, Wall Street interns have long been expected to grind through the grunt work.

This summer’s class is walking into something different.

As banks race to weave AI into everything from market analysis to coding, many firms will be training interns not just on the basics like Excel and accounting, but also on how to use and fact-check generative AI tools that can handle the more mundane tasks that have defined internships. This year’s cohort will be expected to work with AI from day one, not avoid or hide it.

While there’s disagreement on how AI will impact head count — JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon recently said he’ll probably hire fewer bankers, while Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon argued in an opinion piece that the promised job apocalypse is overhyped — there’s growing consensus that Wall Street jobs will look quite different in the coming years.

At Ken Griffin’s hedge fund, Citadel, and market maker, Citadel Securities, applicants were assessed on their AI fluency during the recruitment process, along with their good judgment.

Fabian Figi, the head of campus recruiting at Citadel Securities, said the firm sees this year’s “AI native” interns taking on more “meaningful responsibility very early on, including work focused on applying AI to complex real-world problems.”

Internships are often key to landing lucrative, fiercely competitive roles in investment banking, hedge funds, and private equity, though they themselves are also highly selective: last year, Citadel and Goldman Sachs accepted 0.4% and less than 1% of applicants to their internship programs, respectively. AI could supercharge the competition, as young people compete for rapidly changing, and potentially fewer, jobs.

“I think this is going to be one of the most exciting, rewarding, stimulating periods of time to grow up as a banker or in other parts of finance,” said Rahul Rekhi, president of Rogo, a startup that focuses on generative AI for finance. “The incoming class of interns, pre-MBA analysts, and post-MBA associates is going to ride that wave.”

Interns need new skills

Last year, Wall Street executives were debating whether to let interns use AI, more than how to help them use it. Now, firms are increasingly seeing AI fluency as a key differentiator.

“We’ve kind of left that conversation behind,” Rachel Friedman, head of strategic operations at Rogo, said. “That’s really the biggest difference that I’m seeing: everyone’s really leaning into making sure their interns are being trained on AI.”

This summer, that “leaning in” will often mean incorporating AI tools into orientations, said Chirag Saraiya, a principal at Training the Street, a company that provides technical finance and business training. The company typically teaches two- or three-day training courses for interns during onboarding week, and is integrating AI into the main programming this year.

“To succeed as a banker, it used to be, ‘I need to know accounting, I need to know finance, I need to know Excel.’ I would say familiarity with the tools is going to be a core skill, and that’s kind of how we’re integrating the AI tools into our deliveries for the summer,” Saraiya said.

Both Saraiya and David Haeberle, a professor at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business who leads the school’s Investment Banking Workshop, think it’s important for interns to learn foundational skills, like building models and performing financial analyses. That knowledge, they said, will allow them to use AI tools more effectively.

Yet new critical capabilities are emerging, too, like managing agents. Haeberle and Rekhi said interns’ roles may look more like those of traditional associates, the midlevel employees typically responsible for reviewing interns’ and analysts’ work.

A new definition of success

That ability to verify work could be crucial for this year’s class, and Saraiya said some of his training focuses on how to stress test outputs and effectively poke holes in an AI’s analysis.

He’s concerned about interns assuming AI is correct and passing work to managers, who may themselves assume it’s been closely scrutinized. It’s harder to effectively check work without strong foundational skills, Saraiya said. But banks have dealt with similar questions before, he added, like when juniors transitioned from scratching out analyses with a pencil to consulting online databases decades ago.

“I just think that risk looks different,” Friedman, who was herself an analyst at Jefferies, said of turning in AI’s mistakes. “Junior bankers passing on bad work? Age-old problem.”

Hours are another time-worn issue that may not actually change much with AI, at least not yet. Saraiya said he doesn’t see AI changing the notoriously grueling banking hours — this is not yet “a lifestyle play” — because firms may shift their expectations of what an intern can accomplish in a day.

“If you don’t embrace the tools and do these things faster, then you, compared to your peers, might not be able to accomplish as much as your peers can, and that’s where it’s going to fundamentally end up hurting you,” he said.

Anxiety and opportunity

While many young people in and beyond finance are anxious about how AI will further erode entry-level job prospects, those Business Insider spoke to said that interns have a big opportunity this year. Rekhi, the president of Rogo, said they can use AI to catch up on live deals quickly, instead of chasing down their associate for an hourslong conversation; Saraiya said they can use the free time to glean insight about what the numbers they’re crunching actually mean.

Jacqueline Arthur, the global head of human capital management at Goldman Sachs, said that this year’s interns can bring value because they’re already comfortable using AI in their everyday lives.

“So my advice to them is this: bring questions and curiosity,” she said.

Haeberle, who has been teaching students pursuing careers in finance for more than three decades, said he sees anxiety in everyone from freshmen to graduates. Those who excel, he thinks, will be those who find excitement within the uncertainty and are constantly learning about the newest AI tools.

“It’s much less about pure technical ability, and it’s much more about emotional intelligence,” he said. “We need kids that are going to become great long-term professionals, not kids that are going to make great analysts, because they’re going to have to go out of that analyst job very, very quickly.”

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