There is a palace in Manhattan where the fortunes of the very rich are kept, and the keepers of that palace have looked at the machines — the chatbots that can draft a portfolio, model a retirement, answer a nervous client at midnight — and decided to hire more people. More than ever before. As Alex Nicoll reported for Business Insider, Goldman Sachs brought more than 120 new private wealth advisors into its four-week boot camp this summer, its largest class ever, 30 percent larger than last year’s.
The reasoning is a small parable of our moment. Artificial intelligence may soon serve the middle-class and mass-affluent investor well enough — their needs are, forgive the word, programmable. But a fortune of the Goldman kind is less a portfolio than a family drama with tax consequences: a billionaire dividing money among children, heirs, ex-spouses, resentments. That, the bank believes, will always require a human being with what John Mallory, global co-head of Wealth Management, calls “chemistry.” More than half of Goldman’s private wealth clients have been with the firm for over ten years. In this business, loyalty is the product; everything else is packaging.
The great passing of the trillions
The stakes rise as more than $100 trillion passes between generations. The old advisor’s craft — cultivate one wealthy client, find the “right tone and tenor” — no longer suffices, Mallory said. “Now you’ve actually got to think about all the next generation decision makers who might care about very different things.” The heirs, in other words, are a different tribe from the founders, and they must be won separately.
Goldman’s chief operating officer, John Waldron, flagged private wealth as a big future priority in a September podcast interview with Blackstone’s Christine Andersen. “We serve the wealthiest people in the world, large family offices, ultra-high-net-wealthy folks,” he said — and he expects AI to mint still more, and still wealthier, ultrawealthy people, each requiring a counsellor. The hiring, he concedes, is patient work: “It’s a slow-burn. You grow into this role.”
Four weeks to be trusted
The boot camp ran from late July to mid-August. In the first three weeks, the recruits learn the basics of wealth advisory, the bank’s platform, its instruments. The final week is practice: building a business, applying it to clients. Some sessions are straightforward talks; others have advisors dissecting a portfolio’s hidden problems or fielding mock calls in front of the entire class — an ordeal by improvisation.
Then there is the untrainable thing, which they try to train anyway: how to get clients to like and trust you. Recruits advise simulated clients, with tenured advisors roleplaying both the financial whiz who quizzes you mercilessly and, in Mallory’s words, a “much less sophisticated person.” Knowing when to switch register is the job. Whitney Pigott — a former finance and strategy executive at Amazon and other companies — recognised the skill from corporate life. “In corporate finance, I had some leaders that wanted to dive into the details, while others wanted a high-level overview,” she said. “Similarly, you’re going to have clients who want to deeply understand each investment solution, and others who will put a lot of trust in you and want things communicated in a different way.”
Graduates move to a “host team,” apprenticing to a working advisor, and keep training through their first year — 250 hours in all, counting videos and coursework. The advisor, Mallory said, has evolved from personal broker into something like a “financial doctor,” prescribing remedies for whatever ails the pocketbook. And the mock calls carry a trap for the charming: you may win the account on “good vibes” and discover afterwards you “didn’t do half of what the platform had to offer.” Likability without mastery is a dinner-table talent, not a profession.
What the machine changes, and what it cannot
Generative AI, Mallory observed, already teaches clients to ask “much better questions” — which means tougher ones in the meeting room. The advisors, too, carry the machine: Pigott calls GS Assistant essential for mastering complex strategies before presenting them. “For me to go speak to a potential client about any strategy, I need to master its mechanics inside and out,” she said. She recently used AI applications to research sophisticated risk-management strategies for clients with heavily concentrated equity positions, and is now back in Seattle apprenticing beside an advisor with more than two decades at the firm there. “I have had these mentors and peers for the summer, and now I’m paired with a senior leader who is invested in my success.”
Beau Burbach, who began at Goldman as a Houston private wealth analyst in 2021, states the defence of his profession in one sentence: “I think it changes how we spend our time, but not why.” A machine cannot read the unspoken — “We have to be able to read into what is unsaid” — and it cannot offer what Burbach calls “accountability”: “They want to be able to pick up the phone and call.”
Yet even the old rituals of devotion are being renegotiated. Advisors once advertised their “white-glove service” by writing a cell number on a business card: “You can call me at 11:30 on a Saturday night.” Goldman’s clientele skews older; as the money passes down, Mallory suspects the heirs will happily take their basic answers from a screen. And he confesses the feeling may be mutual: “To be honest, I don’t want to call you on Saturday at 11:30 at night in my pajamas.”
So the machines will take the midnight questions, and the humans will keep the Saturday dinners — the inheritance quarrels, the unspoken fears, the trust that must be built in person, slowly, over years. The palace reckons that grief, greed and family are still beyond the reach of the algorithm. It may be the last comfort the rich have left to buy: another person’s attention.