Goldman’s Sneader: AI Agents Reshape Banking Careers, Middle Managers at Risk

The striking part is the compression of the traditional apprenticeship ladder: if junior staff supervise agents immediately, the training ground that once produced managers is being bypassed, not just accelerated. That makes the middle-management bottleneck a structural problem rather than a cyclical one, and it extends well beyond banking to any field built on layered review. The open question is whether firms can retrain or redeploy experienced managers faster than the entry-level pipeline stops producing them.