Welcome to Wall Street’s AI era.
Banks, private equity firms, hedge funds, and asset managers have been eager to use generative AI to boost productivity and reduce grunt work for workers.
Business Insider has been reporting on how some of finance’s biggest players are approaching artificial intelligence, from its potential impact on jobs and the creation of new ones, to the various ways firms are cutting costs and ramping up efficiencies.
But first — if you work at a Wall Street firm and are using AI, we want to hear from you. How is AI really showing up in your day-to-day? Is it living up to the hype?
Inside Big Banks’ race to deploy AI
AI is set to reshape roughly 44% of banking work by 2030, according to consulting firm ThoughtLinks — and Wall Street’s biggest firms are racing to get there first.
JPMorgan Chase, the largest US bank by assets, is spending $18 billion a year on technology, with AI a central focus. CEO Jamie Dimon is a “tremendous” user of the bank’s generative AI tools, which have now been rolled out to more than 200,000 employees.
The bank is also replacing long-standing human processes with AI. Its asset-management arm announced plans to stop using external proxy advisers for US shareholder voting, instead launching an in-house AI platform, Proxy IQ, which will analyze data from more than 3,000 annual company meetings. Executives have said the bank is training employees to use AI in ways that deliver measurable productivity gains.
Goldman Sachs is spending $6 billion on technology this year — a figure CEO David Solomon has said he wishes were higher. In an October memo outlining the latest phase of its OneGS initiative, the bank said AI would drive efficiency, slow hiring, and lead to a “limited reduction” in roles. Goldman has since rolled out internal AI tools, including an assistant now available to employees across the firm.
Morgan Stanley, an early OpenAI partner, has focused on turning employee ideas into working AI products. One internally built tool, called DevGen.AI has already saved engineers more than 280,000 hours this year. Among interns, AI adoption is especially strong: 72% say they use ChatGPT daily or several times a week.
Citigroup has also accelerated its push. Nearly 180,000 employees across 83 countries now have access to Citi’s proprietary AI tools, which have been used almost 7 million times this year. CEO Jane Fraser said the bank’s generative AI tools are saving about 100,000 developer hours a week through automated code reviews. Citi also began piloting agentic AI with 5,000 employees in September.
Top hedge funds are racing to deploy AI across research, trading, and data
In the ultracompetitive world of hedge funds, being ahead on the latest technology is always a priority.
In December, Citadel said its stockpickers are using an internal chatbot to speed up their processes and find new info at his $71 billion hedge fund.
At the 2025 Global Milken conference, Andreas Kreuz, WorldQuant’s deputy CIO, said the firm was using AI to expand the data it can bring into its models since it can restructure data from images and audio.
Point72‘s CTO Ilya Gaysinskiy told BI about his big plans to ramp up Point72’s tech organization and how AI will play into that expansion.
Bridgewater launched a fund driven by AI in 2024. The fund’s AIA Labs worked to replicate every stage of the investment process with machine learning. The firm’s co-chief investment officer and chief scientist outlined the plans of the world’s largest hedge fund.
$29 billion hedge fund Balyasny has built an AI bot that it believes will be able to do the grunt work that typically falls to senior analysts — a potential huge timesaver for investment teams. The manager told Business Insider in 2024 that roughly 80% of the firm’s staff use its AI tools, which include the internal chatbot BAMChatGPT, and recently hired Matthew Henderey, one of the CIA’s AI developers, as a data science executive. Man Group and Viking Global have also developed their own internal offerings.
Private equity firms are focusing on how AI can boost their investing skills
Lucia Soares — Carlyle’s chief information officer and head of technology transformation — talked to BI about taking on a new challenge: Bringing AI to the investment giant’s 2,300 global employees.
Private equity firms are no strangers to managing and analyzing copious amounts of data — but data is only helpful if you can find it. Blackstone has invested in improving its enterprise search and is also betting AI will give it a leg up in its pursuit to capture more of the insurance market.
Swedish PE giant EQT built an AI engine called Motherbrain that has changed how its investors source deals. ChatGPT enables the investing giant to take the next step with its AI ambitions.
As private equity firms turn to AI for a competitive edge, Thomas H. Lee says its engineers are up to 30% more productive with help from AI coding assistants.
Asset managers are also getting involved in the AI action
AI tools are changing how stock-pickers do their job. AllianceBernstein, BlackRock, and JPMorgan opened up on how their tools are speeding up portfolio manager workflows.
BlackRock has introduced Asimov, the agentic AI platform for the firm’s fundamental equity business. Business Insider talked to Kirsty Craig, head of research, data, and AI strategy for portfolio management tech, who helped develop the tool.
The multi-billion-dollar investment manager VanEck invested in a Toronto-based startup and is onboarding its technology to boost its ETF business. An executive and the fintech’s CEO walked us through how AI will change the jobs of analysts and salespeople.
Fintechs are developing AI tools to help their employees work faster and smarter
Kraken’s $1.5 billion acquisition of a retail trading startup made headlines last March. Less noticed was how the crypto exchange used generative AI to run due diligence on the target — a process its head of M&A now considers core to his team’s work.
At Block, Jack Dorsey’s fintech behind Square, Afterpay, and Cash App, engineers built an AI agent that can write code faster — and in some cases better — than senior developers. The company ultimately decided to open-source the tool, even as it gives competitors a look under the hood.
Chime has taken a similar in-house approach. In 2023, the neobank built a private, ChatGPT-style assistant to help engineers ship products more quickly and at lower cost. The company’s CTO shared how the tool has become a key part of Chime’s product-development playbook.
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