Wall Street's junior employees could be managing teams sooner with AI. The catch? They're teams of bots.

• Top Wall Street tech brass addressed their firms' AI strategies.
• Goldman and JPMorgan executives discussed the effects of AI on leadership and learning.
• Soon, "everybody will be a manager" of AI-powered digital agents, one exec predicted.

Even Wall Street's neophytes may soon get a taste of what it's like to be the boss — albeit they may first be managing bots.

"I think everybody will be a manager a lot sooner than traditional career trajectories that certainly I grew up with would dictate," Teresa Heitsenrether, JPMorgan's chief data and analytics officer, told business executives at the Evident AI Symposium in New York on Thursday.

Critically, "you're going to be managing teams of digital colleagues," Heitsenrether predicted, helping earlier-career employees learn what it's like to take responsibility for workflows before leading teams of people.

Agentic AI was a hot topic at the conference and has been top of mind for corporate execs. The next wave of artificial intelligence technology will involve autonomous bots that can execute end-to-end processes, raising questions about security, quality, and consistency. Looking over their shoulders could conceivably teach young workers how to manage human minds one day.

AI's impact on high finance's junior set was a recurrent theme throughout the day of panels and fireside chats. Marco Argenti, Goldman's chief information officer and the firm's top engineer, said he's watching the bank's youngest professionals teach each other how to get the most out of AI, expanding investment banking's apprenticeship model sideways to peers.

"Apprenticeship is absolutely central," he said. The bank's youngest employees are proving to be the firm's "AI natives," he said.

"The apprenticeship sometimes is even between them and how they actually compare notes and how they actually educate the next generation to just live with this," he added. "These people are going to actually be teaching everybody else how to really be ready for the transformation."

Addressing internal 'anxiety'

Heitsenrether acknowledged that — in an industry known for stalwart conventions, such as apprenticeship in the banking bullpen — change can sometimes meet with reluctance.

"It would be disingenuous to say it doesn't create a bit of anxiety," she said. "If you've grown up and perfected your craft, so to speak, by coming up during an apprenticeship model and really learning the ropes and all of a sudden your job is going to change in meaningful ways — that's a real thing and we have to be very cognizant of that."

Still, the fears seem to have faded quickly at America's biggest bank, a big spender on tech and AI, where everyone from lawyers to call center workers is embracing newly released, cutting-edge internal tools, she continued.

"Once you can show somebody this is something that can make your day a lot more enjoyable or take away those things we all have to do every day that we'd prefer not to," she said, "the resistance comes down a bit."

"The most valuable thing you can do," Heitsenrether added, "is give the technology to people so that they can start to use it and experience it."