American investment bank Goldman Sachs has set up a facility in India to train both engineers and non-engineers in generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) to explore the usage of the technology in its businesses.
Since 2006, Goldman Sachs has invested more than $7 billion in India. Starting off as a support function, the Indian operations have now become the second largest for Goldman Sachs globally.
“In 2024, we aim to train over 1,000 non-engineering business users across Bengaluru and Hyderabad offices in India … They include individuals across operations, controllers, treasury, sales, research and investment banking,” Gunjan Samtani, global chief operating officer of engineering at Goldman Sachs, told ET.
The school was piloted in mid-2023, under which the global financial services major trained employees across asset and wealth management, risk management, global banking and markets functions.
It aims to have more than 4,000 employees trained in AI, said Samtani, who is also the country head for Goldman Sachs Services India.
About two decades ago, it set up Goldman Sachs Services India in Bengaluru as one of its global capability centres and now has over 8,500 employees working out of its Bengaluru and Hyderabad offices, representing about 18% of the total global headcount. The Hyderabad centre was inaugurated in October last year.
Half of the 8,500 staffers in India are engineers, representing one-third of the 12,000 engineers Goldman Sachs employs globally. With the largest office presence outside of its headquarters in New York, India also has the highest percentage of engineers embedded into Goldman Sachs’ front-to-back businesses.
“In the context of distribution of engineers across Americas and India, in totality, I think they are on par with each other,” Samtani said, adding that the bank is making deliberate efforts to prepare its workforce for AI.
This also comes at a time when most technology firms are upskilling and reskilling their employees, especially engineers, in order to improve productivity, efficiency as well as prepare for better AI use-cases and adapting them to new roles.
By the end of the year, according to Samtani, all Goldman Sachs engineers in India, who are in roles that are software development centred, will be enabled on GenAI based co-pilots. There are about 3,200 engineers who are working in software development-related roles.
Goldman Sachs has several hundred open roles over a spectrum of functions. Without giving a specific number, Samtani said: “There will be a tremendous focus in hiring individuals exposed to emerging technologies like AI and cloud engineering. We have open roles in software development and quantitative finance, and additionally in operations, controllers and compliance functions. On the business side, we have roles in our asset management, wealth management, global banking and markets businesses.”
In 2022 and 2023, the company hired an average of 2,000 employees annually in India at the two centres. Around 40% of these were in engineering functions.
Currently, Goldman Sachs has more than 1,000 developers using GenAI for coding.
“More than 100 ideas have been identified across the firm, and we currently have about a dozen proofs of concept. Certain elements of internal use cases are planned for roll-out to a broader population throughout 2024,” Samtani said.
