Goldman Sachs tech boss Marco Argenti recently said that companies may be focusing on the wrong thing by measuring how employees use artificial intelligence (AI) at work. While many firms are pushing workers to use AI tools at work more often, Argenti believes that tracking employee’s AI usage is the wrong way to measure whether it is making them more productive. Instead, companies should focus on the speed at which a team can develop a future, he said. “It would be like looking at only one player on the field,” Argenti said in a Business Insider interview adding “Fine, this player is doing more movements, but why am I not scoring more goals? Well, because they need to pass the ball.”Explaining further, he stated that this measuring approach helps as one can see a productive team’s work backlog starts shrinking rapidly.
How AI changed the way employees work at Goldman Sachs
During the interview, Marco Argenti explained how AI has changed the way employees work at Goldman Sachs. Instead of spending long periods creating presentations to explain ideas, teams can now quickly build working prototypes and improve them instantly based on feedback.“There’s zero time between idea and prototype. You kind of ‘3D print’ software,” he said.The chief information officer also revealed that the investment bank is taking a different approach to adopt AI technology. He revealed that Goldman Sachs measures how quickly its engineering teams can move from coming up with an idea to actually executing on it.Argenti further revealed that the Goldman Sachs staff has moved away from the previous fearfulness or skepticism about AI, adding that employees ‘attitudes are starting to change’. “The dominant sentiment is really a sense of empowerment. People feel almost liberated. A few weeks or months ago, of course, there was a real bit of skepticism and fear, but I correlate that to people that were not really using it,” he said in the interview.Goldman Sachs has been investing heavily in AI tools in recent years. In 2024, the bank launched its GS AI Platform, which uses large language models from companies including OpenAI and Google with added security layers to protect company data.The bank has also introduced internal AI systems similar to ChatGPT and a research tool called “Legend,” which helps employees search through company files using natural language.
