Banking MDs have cautionary words for interns: "In the future, it will be one junior per MD"
AI is coming for junior banking jobs but it has not come for banking internships. Goldman Sachs has 2,500 interns this year, down only slightly from the 2,500 interns it had in 2025. Bank of America has 2,000 interns this year, similar to last. BofA CEO Brian Moynihan has been declaring: "We need young people."
As young people duly arrive for their 2026 internships, though, senior bankers are privately circumspect about their futures. Converting this year's internships into full time graduate jobs could be hard. "They will be lucky to get an offer at all this year," says one managing director, speaking off the record.
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This is because, in the estimation of Debasish Patnaik, a senior partner at Quantum Black, McKinsey's AI consulting arm, banks are preparing to cut their teams of juniors by two thirds. Graduate intakes "will shrink", Patnaik informed Bloomberg this week.
As AI takes over the role of building financial models and making presentations, another MD predicts banks' need for an army of young people will suddenly vanish. "The pyramid structure will look very different in two years," he predicts, referring to banks' hierarchies. "In the future it will be one junior per MD."
The same MD claims that the ratio of juniors to MDs in banks has increased dramatically in the past two decades. In the 1990s, he says banks were set up for managing directors to work with one or two highly capable juniors. This changed as pitchbooks grew. Now there can be four juniors or more per MD. In April, one investment banking analyst told us this ratio was already being cut back as vacancies went unfilled and senior bankers piled tasks upon him in the belief that AI enabled him to work faster. "Why would I spend time teaching an intern if Claude can do their work?", confirms one MD.
Not all senior bankers share the bleak outlook. One of London's top bankers, who began his career in the 1990s, says AI is simply the latest in a long series of technological iterations that typically end up benefitting younger bankers more than the rest. For example, when email was introduced in the mid-1990s, he tells us all the mid-level and senior bankers who couldn't use it disappeared. "In my career I have had to adapt to the use of emails, mobile phone and internet," he adds. "The kids will succeed as they are much smarter than we are."
This same senior banker suggests it's senior associates and vice presidents (VPs) who are most at risk from AI-imposed changes. "The future will be a large group of very smart kids who know how to use AI, working with very senior bankers," he says. "It's the mid-ranks who will be wiped out."
If you're an intern at an investment bank and your VP is unfriendly this summer, this will possibly be why.
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