The threat in class yesterday was: use the AI and you will be caught.
Today’s solution is: don’t use it and you’ll be obsolete.
As artificial intelligence becomes table stakes On Wall Street, business schools are rushing to revise their programs aimed at future hopefuls in the financial sector. Technology is expected to automate much of the work that has defined the role of young bankers, including the routine tasks of building models or endlessly tinkering with slides.
Across the country, universities are adding AI-focused courses, launching new majors and retraining professors to prepare students for a world where algorithms do the heavy lifting and humans provide the judgment.
Wharton, the famous business school of the University of Pennsylvania, introduces a new academic track built around AIoffering students courses integrating psychology, ethics and governance to help them understand how humans and machines will reshape business. In Tennessee, Vanderbilt University is creating a new College of Connected Computing to keep up with the times. Nationally, insiders say a debate is underway over how to update business school curricula, long centered on the fundamentals of traditional finance — like accounting, statistics and financial modeling — as cutting-edge technology outpaces anyone’s ability to keep pace.
The objective is to better prepare the the next generation of Wall Street talent, as recruiters now reward candidates who have the human insight to interpret the outputs that AI produces, question the logic of a system and channel information into coherent transaction strategies.
Jacqueline Arthur, global head of human capital management at Goldman Sachs, told Business Insider that as AI becomes more common, the firm has increased its efforts to probe the analytical thinking of candidates. When meeting with students, the company tries “to see how they think critically, react in the moment and solve a problem,” she said — essentially the attributes that would make a human more valuable than a robot.
Business Insider spoke with educational institution leaders as well as bank hiring managers to determine how the AI revolution transforms what students learn and how they prepare to launch a career on Wall Street.
Wharton’s AI reboot
About 10 years ago, Wharton, the University of Pennsylvania’s renowned business school, became one of the first business schools to formally explore the potential of artificial intelligence. It launched a research center, improved its academic offering and established partnerships with companies on concrete projects for its students.
Now the school takes this job in the classroomby rolling out new courses and an undergraduate and MBA academic pipeline built around AI, Eric Bradlow, Wharton’s vice dean of AI and analytics, told Business Insider.
The new course offerings explore courses from an interdisciplinary perspective, examining how AI will change business and society from a philosophical and psychological perspective. They include “Artificial Intelligence, Business and Society,” “Applied Machine Learning for Business,” “Big Data, Big Responsibilities,” and “AI in Our Lives,” according to Wharton’s list of online courses. Courses combine quantitative analysis and laboratory data projects with lessons on ethics, governance, and behavioral responses to AI technologies; or case studies that explain how humans and AI will work together to reshape organizations and the work economy.
Although some courses involve coding, formation of large language modelsor statistics, many also combine elements of critical analysis to teach students how to validate the results of AI Systems.
Students learn how to query models, examine the results, and determine whether the underlying assumptions hold up to business scrutiny. To accelerate change, Bradlow said, Wharton created an AI in Education Fund that provides faculty with funding, data and technical support to integrate AI materials into existing courses.
Six months ago, a technology executive at a large private equity firm, Bradlow, asked for recommendations for candidates who might sit at the intersection of business strategy and data science.
“I said, ‘We’ll send you five names,’ Bradlow told BI. “He hired every one of them the next day.”
The AI wave is sweeping over other schools
Across the country, schools other than Wharton are also catching the AI wave. One of them is Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, which recently announced the creation of a standalone college dedicated to advanced technologies in AI, computer science, data science and robotics.
Although the school has not finalized its educational programming, the College of Connected Computing is exploring areas of subject overlap as part of its ongoing academic planning with Vanderbilt’s Owen Graduate School of Management, the university told Business Insider in a statement.
“Our teams are actively developing opportunities that reflect the rapidly evolving role of data, AI and analytics in business education,” Vanderbilt added.
At Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business, Steve Sibley, a professor who oversees the investment banking workshop — a program that sends students to major banks, including Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and Moelis — said faculty are studying how to “pivot the program” in light of the rise of AI. The school is increasing the number of case-based courses it offers, he said, and exploring more courses related to AI and programming, such as Python for finance and an upper-level AI and business course.
Training The Street, which provides technical training for banks and early-career finance professionals, has launched a series of free online resources on how to use AI and data tools in finance roles. Scott Rostan, the company’s founder and director of learning and strategy, told Business Insider that the tutorials were open to the public, emphasizing the growing demand for AI training.
Recruiters say these changes reflect what Wall Street is looking for.
“A lot of the tasks that junior employees would have traditionally done will over time be automated, but this will really allow them to focus their attention on higher-value deliverables,” said Arthur, head of global human capital management at Goldman. Training programs at Goldman incorporate AI lessons, she added, with new employee development including hands-on experience with the company’s internal AI tools as well as instruction on responsible use and ongoing human oversight.
“A lot of this quantitative analysis will be automated, but will we need our people to understand how to look at that, evaluate it and make sure that what the AI has provided is actually correct?” » asked Arthur. “Absolutely.”