Goldman Sachs’ CIO has said training AI agents to mesh with company cultures is one of the big challenges facing organizations.
Marco Argenti made the comments on a Goldman Sachs podcast this week, in which he also said humans had to remain in the loop – as their management of agents had to the potential to massively amplify their impact, both good and bad.
The world of AI has changed like three or four times over, even in the last year or so, said Argenti, with the emergence of reasoning models being the key events of the last few months.
These were not incremental changes, he said. “You now have models that, for example, can do real research for you in a depth that was unprecedented before. I personally tried it.”
But he said, “I think right now the biggest friction point to adoption of AI in the enterprise is people, is behaviours, is the fact that you have muscle groups that you need to retrain.”
The development community might find it easier to adopt new tech, he said, being able to take what it needs and not worry about what doesn’t quite work yet. More broadly, he said, “You need to find people that have already crossed the bridge of accepting that a disruption is going take place and be very open to it.” Goldman was actively seeking out “disruptors” as part of its AI rollout.
The use of agents could be very fluid, he said. The nature of tech already made it difficult for a CIO to say exactly how many servers they had from minute to minute. “If you ask me 10 years from now, because you could actually surge agents for a closing of a quarter or for an earning season or for particular times in the market.” Meanwhile the “human side” would remain stable.
But the use of agents posed other managerial challenges, he said. “One of the challenges is to somehow inject the cultural traits, the leadership principles, the tenets, of the organization into the AI agents the same way as you do with humans.”
Goldman had a particular culture, he said, as did his previous employer, Amazon. And the tenets of these cultures is not always documented. “Agents that you implement from the outside are going to be like employees that we hire the first day. And so the challenge is agents will get smarter and smarter, but not culturally smarter if you don't do something on that front.”
See also: The Big Interview: Goldman Sachs CIO Marco Argenti
This wasn’t being talked about much, he said, but agents were already involved in things like drafting research or portfolio analysis, so it was important to put a Goldman lens on it, he said
He cited Isaac Azimov’s three laws of robotics as part of the process. “You know, what are the actual leadership principles or tenets that an effective corporate agent should adhere to in order to fit into the culture of an organization.”
And while it was possible to buy in “virtual developers” for 20 or 30 bucks a month, “You’re always going to need a developer.” A future where humans were marginal was not even in sight, he said. Not least, as someone had to take responsibility for the fact that agents meant “the amplification of your good and your bad can be incredible.”
