OpenAI is planning to automate away entry-level tasks in finance, according to leaked documents—but experts say this doesn’t necessarily signal a workforce reduction just yet.
But experts tell Fortune the move will likely transform rather than replace entry-level roles, a prevailing thought among economists following the AI-adoption wave.
“I’m not convinced that we get rid of entry-level workers anytime soon, but I could imagine a world where the skill set we need those entry-level workers to have is different,” Shawn DuBravac, an economist and CEO of Avrio Institute, a research and consulting firm, told Fortune.
DuBravac believes a “first wave of automation” will hit structured, repeatable tasks junior analysts spend hours during the week working on for their superiors, like cleaning and formatting spreadsheets, building financial models, and assembling pitch decks.
“These are all areas where the data is plentiful, the templates are standardized, and the process can be learned from repetition,” DuBravac said. “Within the next year, I’d expect firms will move quickly to try to automate 60% to 70% of the time analysts currently spend on these lower-level tasks.”
As routine, mundane tasks are automated and AI is more embedded into junior analysts’ workflows, senior analysts will find more “sophisticated” tasks for them to execute—like building financial models with greater complexity, or performing more quantitative analysis, which are skills they might usually learn further along in their careers—he added.
“We often overestimate how impactful some of the technology will be when it comes to eradicating work as we know it,” DuBravac said. “Just like Excel spreadsheets did back in the day, [AI] will streamline some work.”
“Respondents at larger organizations, however, are more likely than others to say their organizations have reduced the number of employees as a result of time saved,” the report said.
For strategy and corporate finance, 29% of respondents predicted no change in the number of employees at their firms as a result of gen AI use, according to the report. Just under a third expect headcount reductions, and 30% predict an increase of headcount within the next three years.
“I could see headcounts staying mostly flat, but at the same time, workloads will become lighter in some areas and heavier in others,” DuBravac said.
Ram Srinivasan, managing director of consulting at JLL, a global commercial real estate and technology services company, told Fortune OpenAI’s initiative to train AI models in financial modeling represents “a natural evolution in investment banking.”
“AI will give every analyst superpowers and allow banks to compound human insight,” Srinivasan said. “Analysts become reviewers and customizers rather than builders from scratch, allowing each person to support more deals simultaneously.”
“There could be a stronger demand for people who have a deeper expertise in AI,” DuBravac said. “You bring some of that in-house, because at the end of the day, finance is all about not just getting the right answer, but getting it more quickly than your competitors, or getting a more differentiated answer than your competitors.”
