Who's reducing their weekly working hours the most in finance with AI: Revealed

The great lie promise of AI is that it will make work easier for us all by reducing the number of hours we work and automating away all the boring grunt work. We asked roughly 2,500 current and prospective finance professionals how much time the technology is saving them on a weekly basis to see just how beneficial the technology actually is.

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The group saving the most time is quants, who said they save more than six hours per week on average using AI, compared to an average of 4.9 hours across the whole dataset. The second-biggest beneficiaries of AI are financial technologists, who save 5.9 hours per week on average. It's unsurprising that these two groups top the ranks. Modern coding tools are perhaps the greatest productivity boon AI has produced, and both divisions use them extensively to build mathematical models and technical infrastructure, respectively.  

One UK-based quant said that technical staff "can genuinely be up to 10x more productive in specific circumstances." Management seems to know this too; a Singaporean quant said that his first boss told him that his job was "to automate yourself out of a job every 18 months," but now he's expected to do so every "18 weeks."

Below technical staff, the other groups saving the most time are all front-office. M&A bankers as well as macro and credit traders, each save more than five hours per week with AI. This is partly, ironically, because they're allowed to do more work; up until this week, Goldman Sachs bankers and traders had allegedly been developing hundreds of personalized tools via vibe coding that could speed up their own workflows. 

One 40-year-old M&A banker in EMEA said that "all deliverables are now AI-automated to a significant extent." She said that, in theory, staff working 80+ hours per week "can deliver the same volume much faster," but that it doesn't always correlate to fewer hours. "The current model is time-based and its completely obsolete right now," she said. Another banker based in the US said the work of his juniors was being "simplified," which means less hiring overall and more emphasis on "training of the next generation."

The middle and back office are less blessed. Risk, operations and finance/accounting are each in the bottom five for hours saved. Risk is joint last for hours saved alongside commodities sales and trading.

Who is working more hours in finance because of AI?

Given the rise of AI slop, we also gave respondents an opportunity to say whether they were working more hours because of the technology. This group made up a small (but not inconsequential) 4.3% of respondents. The groups with the highest concentration of people working more hours were... interesting.

Risk staff were the worst off. In addition to saving the fewest hours with AI, they also had the highest proportion, ~10% of respondents, working additional hours. There are several reasons for this; one UK-based risk manager said that they have "more to check now than ever" due to an abundance of "AI slop" produced by other team members. He also said that he lost "most of his team" and was told to do their work with AI instead; risk has been one of the most commonly affected groups by the mass layoffs banks have been conducting over the past year. 

Ironically, the two groups that saved the most hours, tech and quant, were the only two other groups with a higher-than-average proportion of staff working more hours thanks to AI. Part of this is because quant roles were previously separated into researchers, developers and strats, but today the lines are blurring. 

There are other reasons. One UK-based senior quant said that the technology is "lobotomising a generation of workers" and that his workload is increased by coworkers "putting LLMs on garbage data and expecting quality."

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