Will Investment Bankers Be Replaced by AI? What Junior Analysts Face in 2026

TL;DR

• Will investment bankers be replaced by AI? The profession, no. The junior analyst seat is shrinking, though: Goldman's 2026 summer class was about 2,500, roughly 100 fewer than 2025, and its CEO expects AI to trim starting classes somewhat.

• AI now drafts pitch-book pages, summarizes documents and pulls data, which is the core of a first-year analyst's week.

• Senior bankers who own clients, judgment and negotiation are the least exposed.

• To get ready, build models you can defend, practice fixing AI-drafted work and get deal-style project experience before summer 2028 applications open.

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Will Investment Bankers Be Replaced by AI?

Will investment bankers be replaced by AI? No, not as a profession, because deals still run on relationships, judgment and negotiation. But for junior analyst work, our verdict is Shrinking at entry level, and for banking overall it's Transforming. The production tasks that filled a first-year analyst's nights are exactly what bank AI tools now draft in seconds.

The Short Answer

Investment banking survives AI; the bottom of the pyramid gets narrower. Goldman Sachs ran a 2026 summer intern class of about 2,500, around 100 fewer than in 2025, and CEO David Solomon said AI will "probably" reduce the number of people the firm starts with over the next few years, though not dramatically (Fortune, June 2026). That's a trim, not a collapse.

Banking is one of the most common things students bring up with us. Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan sit near the top of the companies students most want to see on Extern (124 and 98 of 1,285 responses in our survey). So we get the AI question a lot, usually phrased as "Should I still try for IB?" Our honest answer: yes, if you want it, but go in knowing the junior seat is changing.

This is the banking deep dive. For advisors, FP&A and lending, see our parent piece on whether AI will replace finance jobs, and for the cross-industry list, our guide to jobs AI won't replace.

The AI Exposure Scorecard for Investment Banking

Same five rows we use across the whole series.

Sources: BLS AI exposure categories (Aug 2026), Anthropic labor market impacts (Mar 2026), BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook (2025-35), Fortune (Jun 2026), Extern posting tracker (Adzuna counts, Jul to Oct 2026).

A note on that "Very high" label. BLS builds it from five research measures, and it explicitly isn't a job-loss forecast. Nearly every white-collar finance role lands in the top bucket.

So what makes banking different? How concentrated the exposed tasks are in the junior years.

What Parts of Investment Banking Is AI Already Doing?

AI in banking today handles the first draft. It builds pitch-book pages, summarizes long documents, pulls figures into tables, writes code and translates. What it doesn't do is decide what story to tell a client, which numbers matter for a specific deal, or how to negotiate.

Tasks AI Handles in an Analyst's Week

Here's how a junior analyst's classic workload maps to tools banks have described in public.

That pitch-book demo is the one that should get your attention. CNBC reported in September 2025 that about 250,000 JPMorgan employees had access to the bank's LLM Suite and that half used it roughly every day, according to chief analytics officer Derek Waldron. A deck that once ate an analyst's evening took half a minute. Sure, a senior banker still has to fix it.

But the first draft is no longer where a junior's value lies.

Goldman's rollout followed the same arc. Fortune reported in June 2025 that the GS AI Assistant went firmwide after more than 10,000 employees tested it for over a year.

What the Banks Themselves Say

Bank leaders aren't pretending nothing will change. In his shareholder letter dated April 2026, Jamie Dimon wrote that AI "will definitely eliminate some jobs, while it enhances others," and promised plans to redeploy affected staff (JPMorganChase 2025 annual report letters). COO Jennifer Piepszak wrote in her letter that fewer roles are "likely" in certain jobs, but "the goal is not fewer headcount."

And inside the investment bank specifically, the bank's line-of-business letters say more than 65,000 colleagues in the Commercial & Investment Bank actively use LLM Suite.

Goldman, back in 2025, said it had no current plans for its AI assistant to replace jobs. A year later Solomon was talking about smaller starting classes. Both statements can be true. Read them together and you get the real picture: not layoffs of bankers, but fewer new analysts hired to do work a tool now drafts.

What Does the Job Data Say About Junior Bankers?

The data says junior banking is tightening, not vanishing. BLS projects near-flat growth for the occupation that includes bankers, Extern's posting tracker shows analyst listings rising through fall 2026, and Goldman trimmed its intern class slightly. Early-career research shows young workers losing ground in AI-exposed fields.

BLS and the Missing Investment Banker Category

Here's something most "will AI replace bankers" articles skip: BLS doesn't track investment bankers as their own occupation. It files them under securities, commodities and financial services sales agents, projected at +1% from 2025 to 2035 with a May 2025 median of $78,660 overall and $103,030 in the securities and investments industry. Much of the actual analyst work sits closer to financial and investment analysts, projected at +7%.

Neither figure tells you about first-year analyst classes at banks. So we look at hiring signals instead.

From Extern's Data: Banking Postings

In US job-posting counts Extern tracks daily (Adzuna, July to October 2026), live "investment banking analyst" postings went from about 370 to about 500, comparing the July and October monthly averages. Small base, but the direction is up, and it lines up with the fall recruiting season.

Banks show up heavily among the employers posting the most finance internships in Extern's posting tracker (Aug to Nov 2026): Jefferies, Barclays, Citi and TD Securities are all in the top ten. To be clear, these banks aren't Extern partners. That's simply where the listings are.

What the Hiring Numbers Show

The Goldman numbers deserve a closer look. Per that same Fortune report, the acceptance rate stayed under 1% for a third straight year (about 0.7% in 2025, on more than 360,000 applications), and the firm expected about 2,500 permanent entry-level hires in July 2026. Fewer seats, same flood of applicants.

Zoom out and the pattern repeats. Anthropic's March 2026 labor market study, which names financial analysts among the most exposed occupations, found the job-finding rate for 22- to 25-year-olds entering highly exposed jobs down about 14% compared with 2022 (only barely statistically significant), with no rise in unemployment for exposed workers. Indeed's Hiring Lab found that in the most AI-exposed occupations, the entry-level share of postings fell from 29% to 10% between 2021 and 2026, while the senior share rose from 22% to 47% (September 2026). Indeed calls that seniority split "suggestive," and it covers only postings with salaries.

Revelio Labs titled an October 2026 chart "Banks Are Losing Interest in Junior Talent in the AI Era", with a subtitle saying the industry is restructuring around AI rather than being automated by it. That phrase is about as good a summary as we've found.

Is any of this proof that AI caused the squeeze? Not quite. Interest rates, deal volume and a crowded pipeline of applicants all play a part.

But every signal points the same way for juniors, and that's the part you can plan around.

Which Banking Roles Are Safest, and Which Are Most at Risk?

Senior coverage bankers, quant and data roles, and corporate finance exits hold up best. The most pressure lands on junior analysts and research associates, whose production work is easiest to automate, and on trading roles, where automation started years before generative AI.

Sources: BLS OOH and AI exposure categories (Aug 2026), Anthropic (Mar 2026), Fortune (Jun 2026). BLS has no investment banker or quant occupation; proxies are labelled.

Where the Pressure Lands First

Junior analysts first, obviously. Research associates sit right behind them, since summarizing filings and extracting data is a big slice of that job too. Trading got hit earlier and by older technology: BLS already credits automated trading systems with reducing demand for traders, and notes that simple stock purchases now happen online without a broker.

The associate row is the one we're least sure about. No study measures it separately. Our read is that associates absorb more review work as analyst classes shrink, but we'd treat that as an educated guess.

Where Banking Holds Up

The top of the house. Coverage bankers win mandates because a CEO trusts them, and that's the part of the job the tools banks have announced barely touch. Quant and data roles also look solid: BLS projects data scientists, the closest proxy, at +35% through 2035 (our guide to becoming a quant covers that path).

And the classic exits still exist. Financial managers, the group that includes FP&A leads and controllers, are projected at +10%. Consulting is another common landing spot, and our sibling piece on whether AI will replace consultants covers how that field is changing.

How Is AI Changing the Junior Analyst Job?

The junior analyst job is shifting from making the first draft to owning the final one. Analysts spend less time formatting pages and summarizing filings and more time checking AI output, keeping model logic straight and preparing for client conversations. Banks still want the same technical base, just applied to review rather than production.

A First-Year Analyst's Week, Then and Now

Picture the classic first-year week: formatting pitch-book pages until the logos line up, spreading comps from filings by hand. Summarizing a 200-page document overnight so a VP can skim it at 7 a.m. Rinse and repeat on three live deals.

Now the first pass on a lot of that comes from LLM Suite or the GS AI Assistant.

So what fills the hours? Checking, mostly. Is that EBITDA figure from the right fiscal year, or did someone pull the wrong column? Did the summary miss the change-of-control clause? Does the model still balance after the buyer changed its offer?

The hours probably aren't getting shorter, at least not yet. We honestly don't know whether AI will cut banking hours or just raise the number of deals each team handles; the banks haven't published anything on it. What's clear is that the work an analyst gets judged on has moved.

Our author spent years in recruitment process outsourcing, on the screening side of hiring, and this shift changes how a banking resume reads. A bullet like "Built 40-page pitch book" now sounds like a tool's output. A bullet like "Rebuilt a comps set after finding two mismatched fiscal years in the source data" sounds like someone a deal team can trust at 1 a.m.

What Banks Now Expect on Day One

Employers are split on how fast this is moving. In NACE's spring 2026 survey, just over a quarter of employers said AI has already reduced the need for some entry-level tasks, more than half said it hasn't, and only 11% were discussing AI replacing positions. Banking sits on the faster end of that range, given how much of the junior workload is drafting.

Yet the core technical bar hasn't dropped. Banks still test accounting, valuation and modeling in interviews. What's new is the expectation that you can use AI tools without trusting them blindly. Over 7 years at Extern, we've watched the early-career market shift in real time, and this is the clearest version of it we've seen: the entry ticket is the same, but the job behind the door is different.

What Skills Make a Junior Banker Hard to Replace?

The junior bankers who stay valuable know accounting cold, can defend valuation choices, catch errors in AI-built pages, explain numbers clearly to clients and seniors, and understand how real deals get done. Each skill needs a proof point you can show an interviewer.

Five Skills and How to Prove Each One

1. Accounting and three-statement fluency. You can't check an AI's model if you can't build one, so prove it with a three-statement model on a public company that you can walk through line by line.

2. Valuation judgment. DCF, trading comps, precedent transactions and a basic LBO. The proof is a short memo explaining why you picked your comps and discount rate, not just the output.

3. Reviewing AI output. Have an AI tool draft a company profile, then mark up every error you find. Bring that markup to interviews; it's a story few candidates have.

4. Client-ready communication. Present a deliverable to a real person and take their questions. Banking is a client business, and AI can't sit in the meeting for you.

5. Deal sense. Read the merger announcements and fairness opinions of a few real transactions and write down why the buyer paid what it did.

Our investment banking interview questions guide covers the technicals banks still test. And if you're still choosing a major, our list of the best-paying AI-proof majors puts finance next to the alternatives.

The Skill Nobody Lists: Staying Accurate at 1 a.m.

Ownership. When a number in a client deck is wrong, nobody blames the software. They blame the analyst who sent it.

So the most valuable trait for a junior banker in an AI-heavy workflow might be the boring one: checking everything, every time, especially when you're tired. You can't put that on a resume directly. But you can show it through work where accuracy mattered and someone relied on your numbers.

How Can You Get AI-Ready Banking Experience as a Student?

Get on the summer 2028 calendar now, build one model you can defend in an interview, and add deal-style project experience with a real company. Investment banking recruits earlier than almost any other field, so sophomores are already on the clock.

Know the Summer 2028 Calendar

Our investment banking internships 2028 guide expects most summer 2028 applications to open between December 2026 and January 2027. Some are already live: as of October 9, 2026, our summer 2028 finance internships guide found programs open at Evercore, Moelis (Houston), Leerink Partners and Baird. Windows can be brutally short. Last cycle, Goldman's investment banking track opened on January 1, 2026 and was off its open list by January 14.

If you're behind on the broader finance timeline, our finance internships summer 2027 guide explains how the cycle works. For bank-by-bank detail, start with our Goldman Sachs internship guide and our Jefferies internship guide.

1. Pick 15 to 20 target banks. Spread them across bulge bracket, elite boutique and middle market firms, because each tier recruits on a slightly different clock.

2. Set careers-page alerts this month. Then apply the week a posting goes live, not the week before it closes.

3. Build and rehearse one model. Be ready to walk through it in any first-round interview.

4. Add project work you can discuss. Interviewers remember a real deliverable far longer than a list of courses you took.

Build Deal and Modeling Proof

Most Externships run 8 weeks (the range is 4 to 11), fully remote, at 5 to 10 hours a week with an extern manager. Four fit banking especially well:

• The Yinan Zhao Investing & Financial Modeling Externship for modeling and investment analysis.

• The Mangusta Capital Deal Sourcing & Startup Analysis Externship for screening companies.

• The HP Tech Ventures Venture Capital: Deal Sourcing & Startup Analysis Externship for the corporate venture side of deals, where a big company invests in startups that might matter to its own business.

• The Attronica Financial Planning & Analysis and Private Company Valuation Externship for valuing a private company, a core skill in deal work.

Will an Externship get you a bulge-bracket offer by itself? No. But it gives you a real valuation or deal screen to talk through when an interviewer asks what you've actually built. When you're ready, browse current Externships.

Extern is not affiliated with, sponsored by or endorsed by any company, firm or organization named here. This article is based on publicly available information as of November 2026. Job data and company plans change, so check the original sources linked above.

Frequently Asked Questions

Will AI replace investment banking analysts?

Not entirely, but banks will likely hire somewhat fewer of them. AI already drafts pitch-book pages and summarizes documents, the core of first-year work. Goldman's CEO said in June 2026 that AI will probably reduce starting classes, though not dramatically, and that the firm will still hire many people out of school.

Will AI replace financial modeling?

AI speeds up the mechanical parts of modeling, like pulling historical numbers and building first-draft spreadsheets. It doesn't decide which assumptions make sense for a specific deal, and someone still has to defend the model to a senior banker or client. Learning to build and check models yourself matters more now, not less.

Are banks still hiring junior analysts in 2026?

Yes, though the classes are slightly smaller. Goldman Sachs expected about 2,500 permanent entry-level hires in July 2026 and ran a summer intern class of about 2,500, around 100 fewer than in 2025. Competition stays brutal: Goldman's 2025 acceptance rate was about 0.7% on more than 360,000 applications.

Will AI replace quants?

Unlikely in the near term, since quants build and test the models that automate other work. BLS has no separate quant occupation, but its closest proxy, data scientists, is projected to grow about 35% from 2025 to 2035. The bar keeps rising, though, so strong programming and statistics skills matter more each year.

Is investment banking still worth it with AI?

For students who want deal exposure, client work and fast learning, yes. The training and exit options are still the draw. The trade-off is fewer junior seats and a job that tilts toward checking AI output and client work, so you'll need sharper technical skills and real project experience to stand out.

What do IB analysts do all day now?

They still build models, prepare pitch materials and support live deals, but more of the first draft comes from AI tools. Analysts spend more time checking numbers, fixing AI errors, updating models when deal terms change and preparing for client calls. The hours remain long; the mix of tasks is what's shifting.

Will AI take over investment banking?

No. Deals still run on relationships, trust and negotiation, which AI doesn't own. What AI is taking over is the production layer: drafting, summarizing and formatting. JPMorgan's CEO wrote in April 2026 that AI will eliminate some jobs while enhancing others, which fairly sums up where banking is headed.