Goldman Sachs partner Chris Churchman warns AI risks banker skills

Goldman Sachs partner Chris Churchman warns AI risks banker skills

Mon, August 24, 2026 at 8:16 PM GMT+3 2 min read

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Chris Churchman, a Goldman Sachs partner who leads the bank's digital platform for institutional clients, warned Monday that the spread of AI across Wall Street risks degrading the analytical abilities of the next generation of bankers.

"There's a huge danger here that in the era of AI, we outsource our reasoning to these models, and we have cognitive atrophy that stops us being able to reason from first principles ourselves," Churchman said during an episode of Goldman's "Exchanges" podcast, according to a transcript provided to CNBC.

Churchman, who also serves as co-chair of Goldman's Global Banking and Markets AI working group, compared the dynamic to the way GPS and search engines quietly hollowed out skills people once built through practice. When algorithms absorb the work that used to build judgment in young bankers and traders, he argued, the pipeline of seasoned talent begins to break down.

"You learn by doing, and a lot of knowledge is tacit, it was never written down," Churchman said.

Junior traders, for instance, build their instincts by working through client pricing requests alongside veteran risk takers who can guide them in the moment. Automating that process could mean senior traders never fully develop their own understanding, Churchman said. "We can absolutely automate that," he said, "but then do we get the senior traders that fully understand?"

Goldman needs to preserve the knowledge that its best people hold today and ensure the next generation acquires it as well, he said. Employees should be the ones making the final call on consequential decisions, he said, and not simply ratify whatever an automated system recommends.

Churchman said Goldman has not yet determined how it will manage that transition. "You still need to reason about [problems] and structure it into an argument, and now we're delegating reasoning," he said.

Churchman also reflected on the engineering challenges involved in bringing AI capabilities to Marquee, the Goldman platform through which hedge funds and other large clients tap into the bank's market data, research, analytics, and execution tools, according to CNBC. The Marquee AI features are currently available only to Goldman employees. Getting AI outputs to be consistently correct and traceable is the steepest technical obstacle, he said, because the margin for error in finance is far narrower than what consumer chatbot users routinely accept.

At one point during development, Churchman said, the platform surprised the team by volunteering its own limitations unprompted. "It was like, 'Look, in the end, I'm better at sounding thorough than being thorough.'"