How is AI changing technology jobs in financial services?
Among all the different types of jobs in finance, technology and engineering is arguably being impacted by AI the most. AI tools, particularly coding agents, are being rolled out en masse, but which jobs are benefitting from them, and which jobs are being put at risk?
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Petter Kolm, director of NYU Courant's mathematics in finance masters, told us that AI will lead to "task convergence rather than the sudden disappearance of entire job categories." He notes that, in hedge funds, data scientists are seeing their roles converge with quant researchers and research engineers. In the process, the lines between technical roles are becoming "less rigid."
In banking, AI is being used to write legacy technology systems. Morgan Stanley built Devgen.ai, a tool which it said saved 280,000 hours of human work that would have been spent updating its systems. This is good news for the in-house developers working with those tools but bad news for contractors who specialise in legacy languages like COBOL and could previously earn $400 per day for their niche.
At the RAISE Summit this month, Goldman Sachs CIO Marco Argenti said that a recent shift has been that tech teams are asking for additional work and projects without asking for additional staff. He said this is because "people are completing projects ahead of time which is kind of new for engineering."
Luckily, there's an abundance of new projects. Argenti said that AI tools like Claude Code, Codex and Devin are allowing strats and non-technical staff in business lines like wealth management or investment banking to vibe code prototypes based on suggestions from clients. Rather than having a handful of notes on a napkin from which to build a product, he said that engineers now have "something that looks exactly like what the client wants," and their role is to "insert a solid foundation."
When it comes to day to day work, some engineers might be upset that they're not in the weeds as AI writes all the code. Instead, the key human role appears to be testing and analyzing code; Argenti said "testing is absolutely crucial, especially in the age of AI where you might have inexplicable behavior."
The amount you'll be expected to use AI tools varies from bank to bank. JPMorgan has an internal dashboard tracking AI usage across its developers; Business Insider reported in April that the bank told its staff there should be a "meaningful improvement" in code volume and quality using AI tools. Argenti said that Goldman isn't tracking AI usage so stringently, but is instead tracking "velocity," meaning you'll be expected to complete tasks and projects quicker thanks to AI.
Return to our guide to technology jobs in finance.
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