- ChatGPT can now handle research, financial analysis and pitchbook creation.
- Those tasks have traditionally formed the early training ground for junior bankers.
- Goldman Sachs has warned that automating such work could affect how future financiers develop their skills.
OpenAI is taking ChatGPT deeper into Wall Street with a new financial services product that can research companies, analyze financial data and create the presentations investment bankers rely on. The technology could make bankers more productive, yet it also touches something less obvious: the way Wall Street trains its next generation.
ChatGPT for Financial Services, a tailored version of OpenAI’s enterprise product ChatGPT Work, was developed with design partners Morgan Stanley and Evercore. It uses GPT-6 Astra and is initially aimed at investment bankers and equity researchers.
During a demonstration, OpenAI showed the system analyzing a potential M&A target, pulling financial figures from industry data sources, selecting relevant peers, putting prices into a spreadsheet, checking charts against the underlying data and explaining a company’s sell-off and rebound. It then created a formatted PowerPoint presentation using a bank’s style guide.
“We're effectively teaching ChatGPT to research like an analyst and back up its conclusions like an analyst as well,” OpenAI vice president of product Nick Turley said during a briefing.
That description gets to the heart of the disruption.
For decades, recent college graduates joining investment banks as analysts and associates have started by doing much of this work themselves. They research companies, gather financial figures, compare peers, build models and spend long hours assembling pitchbooks for senior bankers.
Those tasks may look like grunt work from the outside. Inside a bank, they are also part of the apprenticeship.
Junior bankers learn how companies make money by pulling apart financial statements. They learn how markets value businesses by comparing peers. They learn how to turn a pile of numbers into an argument while building presentations for deals.
Now, AI is learning to do many of those steps itself.
“It's very easy to make slides that look good, but it's much harder to make slides [that] actually make sense,” Turley said. “To get here, ChatGPT had to choose the relevant peers. It had to pull the prices into a spreadsheet. It had to check the chart against the data, and it had to explain the sell-off and the rebound.”
The financial version of ChatGPT Work comes with native access to data from LSEG, Daloopa and PitchBook, covering areas such as financial statements, earnings transcripts and company fundamentals. Users can also connect existing data subscriptions through integrations including FactSet, S&P Global, Preqin and Datasite.
OpenAI has also built in citations that allow users to trace figures back to source filings and audit charts, along with administrative controls for sensitive deal materials. The product uses the security foundation of ChatGPT Enterprise, including role-based access, encryption and compliance log exports.
OpenAI says there has been “a ton of demand” for the product, although Turley did not name the banks that have signed on. The company also plans to develop tailored solutions for other sectors beyond financial services.
The question Wall Street cannot ignore
OpenAI describes the technology as an efficiency tool. Asked whether it could reduce the need for investment banks to hire junior bankers, Turley compared the impact with Microsoft Excel.
“If you study the life of an analyst or of a banker, depending on the industry, they're working 100-hour weeks,” he said. “I think in the same way that Microsoft Excel transformed the industry and allowed them to produce better analysis faster, you will see technology like this do the same.”
That may be true for productivity. The harder question is what happens to the people who once learned through that work.
Chris Churchman, a Goldman Sachs partner overseeing one of the bank’s AI projects, warned last month that automating tasks used to train junior bankers could lead to “cognitive atrophy” among the next generation of financiers.
“Reasoning is still important,” Churchman said. “You still need to reason about [problems] and structure it into an argument, and now we're delegating reasoning.”
That creates a tension Wall Street will have to confront. If an analyst no longer spends hours researching a company or checking every number in a presentation, they may have more time for higher-value work. Yet they may also lose some of the hands-on experience that traditionally helped them progress into more senior roles.
The issue is bigger than one ChatGPT product. OpenAI is competing with Anthropic and Google for enterprise customers, while financial institutions are becoming an important testing ground for AI that can work with sensitive, regulated data.
OpenAI launched a separate Data agent for ChatGPT Work a day before the financial services announcement, allowing companies to connect approved data sources and use natural language to generate answers, dashboards and automated actions.
For Wall Street, the direction is becoming clear: more of the work once handled by junior employees can now be delegated to software.
The unanswered question is whether banks will simply use AI to make their existing teams faster, or whether they will eventually need fewer people at the bottom of the ladder.
And if the ladder gets shorter, Wall Street will have to figure out how its future dealmakers climb it.
