• Mastercard is using AI to help detect and prevent credit card fraud.
• The company says the tech can flag unusual patterns and block fraudulent transactions.
• This article is part of "AI in Action," a series exploring how companies are implementing AI innovations.

When the text message came in, Kim Dow's heart sank.

"Hi," it read. "Did you just make this purchase with your REI Co-op Mastercard?"

The message went on to share the last four digits of Dow's card number and a purchase for $88.69 worth of Alaska Airlines miles, which Dow says she did not make.

She texted back "no." Within seconds, Mastercard's fraud department disputed the charge and removed it from Dow's active statement.

Though credit card safety technology has advanced in recent years with multi-factor authentication and EMV chips, fraud situations like Dow's still happen. Mastercard, one of the country's oldest credit card companies, is using artificial intelligence to prevent and minimize situations like this.

For the past 10 years, the credit giant has incorporated some form of machine learning algorithms to monitor transactions in real time and detect unusual patterns such as multiple failed logins and large or sudden withdrawals.

Mastercard's newest iteration of its AI-powered fraud detection system features AI technology that scans nearly 160 billion transactions every year. This technology has helped Mastercard significantly reduce false-positive fraud cases, according to a May 2024 press release from the company.

AI powers a risk-scoring system that flags suspicious transactions

Identifying fraud often comes down to pattern recognition, which makes AI well-suited for the task, said Daryl Lim, an affiliate at the Center for Socially Responsible Artificial Intelligence.

"AI enables real-time detection of suspicious transactions by identifying patterns and anomalies impossible for human analysts to spot at scale," Lim, who's also the H. Laddie Montague Jr. Chair in Law at Penn State Dickinson Law, told BI.

This is especially true for a company such as Mastercard, which has large amounts of data that can be used to train an AI on what to look for, said Seckin Yilgoren, Mastercard's senior vice president of security solutions in North American markets.

Yilgoren said the company processes nearly 160 billion transactions every year, providing it with terabytes upon terabytes of data to study and analyze for patterns that might expose fraud.

Mastercard uses this knowledge to inform a risk-scoring system called Decision Intelligence, which assigns a score to each transaction. To do this, the system continuously scans hundreds of millions of data points, such as a cardholder's name, address, and purchase history, to predict whether a transaction is likely to be genuine.

Scores above a certain threshold are deemed legitimate, while those below the threshold are flagged as fraud. It does this in 50 milliseconds or less, Yilgoren said — an important point because it means the system can detect and block fraudulent transactions nearly in real time. This can prevent headaches for customers like Dow by giving them the opportunity to approve or decline suspicious transactions almost immediately.

Decision Intelligence is also continuously learning and adapting to new fraud patterns without human intervention, Yilgoren said. He added that this technology could snuff out false positives. By predicting context and behavior, AI can detect patterns the human brain cannot, and can distinguish between legitimate unusual activity, such as a rare entertainment splurge on a new television or concert tickets, and actual fraud, Yilgoren said.

This year, Mastercard also introduced Decision Intelligence Pro, a system that assesses the relationships between identifying user characteristics and past user behaviors to determine the validity of a transaction.

Lim told BI that these technologies make a compelling argument for AI as a method of fraud detection, but they also have limitations.

He said that machine learning models could inadvertently learn to associate legitimate transactions with fraud based on biased historical data. If this happens, an AI-powered system has the potential to flag certain demographics or locations disproportionately. This raises serious concerns around equity and trust, Lim said.

He said the final layer of fraud detection measures can often benefit from human judgment since they can investigate and provide insights into why any given transaction was flagged. "The goal is a hybrid model: AI for speed and scale, humans for nuance and accountability," Lim told BI.

Andrew Reiskind, Mastercard's chief data officer, agreed. He said the company has an AI governance program in which employees provide oversight on all AI-powered operations and solutions.

"By integrating human-centered design into our AI solutions and overseeing the process, we ensure that our technology not only enhances efficiency and delivers great products but also aligns with our ethical standards and commitment to responsible AI use," Reiskind told BI.

Leveraging AI to fight fraud rings — and customer dishonesty

Mastercard also uses AI to detect fraud by mapping connections between accounts, devices, and transactions.

This technology uses behavioral biometrics, which examine how specific users type and swipe on apps, to try to detect imposters. Apps monitor this information as part of each transaction. From there, on the back end, an algorithm takes into account unique data points such as the cadence with which a user types in a password, how they hold a device, and how they move their mouse. Yilgoren said there is a "slight but noticeable" difference between a trusted user's behaviors and the imitation of them.

There's also the issue of first-party fraud, which occurs when a consumer makes a legitimate purchase and later requests a chargeback, even though goods and services were received. To combat this, Mastercard has rolled out its First-Party Trust program, which uses AI to scan data points such as IP address, device ID, and shipping address to determine the likelihood that a chargeback request is legitimate.

Yilgoren said this initiative incorporates AI and risk modeling to enable greater insight into a cardholder's purchase history, delivery information, and geographic location. This, in turn, can help determine whether the original purchase was legitimate.

In 2024, Mastercard also launched Scam Protect, a suite of AI-powered solutions designed to help identify and prevent online scams.

"Really, it's a question of how we can ensure data security and trust for our customers, but also for the banks and merchants who use our services," Yilgoren said.

• Corporate sales work often requires face-to-face meetings and client calls.
• At Salesforce, sellers use AI-powered tech to help them prepare for these conversations.
• This article is part of "AI in Action," a series exploring how companies are implementing AI innovations.

After a long day of meeting with clients, Haley Gault, a Salesforce seller, received a last-minute ping from a customer saying they wanted to meet with her face-to-face within the hour.

Gault started to sweat: The customer's business, electric vehicle charging stations, was not a topic she knew well. To get up to speed, she pulled up Salesforce's Agentforce AI tool in Slack, typed in "EV contractors," and received a dossier of previous sales, call recordings, and industry trends.

"I don't have a vertical, so I'm no industry expert in regards to electric vehicle contracting," Gault said. "That's a way for me to really quickly get up to speed on who this customer is. What were the previous conversations with Salesforce? Who are the key stakeholders?"

Gault isn't alone in harnessing AI tools for her sales role. When McKinsey asked about 1,500 companies about how they used generative AI, sales and marketing were the most common responses.

Dan Gottlieb, Gartner's vice president analyst for sales, told Business Insider that sales professionals are an industrious group of self-starters who are actively searching for new AI use cases. They use artificial intelligence to compile research, develop leads, and even hone their pitching skills, Gottlieb said.

But the increasing implementation of AI in sales raises the question: Could this integration diminish the power of human connection? Corporate selling is, after all, a fundamentally human process that relies on relationship building, typically via phone calls and client dinners.

At Salesforce, its 25,000 sellers use AI tools to improve their human approach to sales, not erase it, Connor Marsden, the company's North America president of industrial, consumer, and energy, told BI.

How AI can bolster seller goals

The Columbia Business School professor Michael Brown said he'd noticed some sales professionals worrying about whether AI is dehumanizing the selling process.

"I don't know any buyer who wants to be sold to by a copilot," Brown told BI.

He added that there would always be client-buyers who want to have in-person conversations with sellers about pricing, discounts, and legal agreements. At the same time, Brown said he had a positive outlook on AI's expansion to sales processes, so long as it continues to enhance worker performance.

To do that, sellers should think about applying AI to their daily unstructured tasks, like client research, brainstorming how to approach a particular situation, and making sense of large amounts of information quickly, Gottlieb said.

Gault, for example, has shared parts of her favorite sales-related book with Salesforce's autonomous AI agent, Sales Coach. After Gault input passages from "Never Split the Difference" by the former FBI hostage negotiator Christopher Voss into her agent, it offered her advice based on Voss' techniques, like to acknowledge customers' emotions when they express frustrations.

With Sales Coach, Gault said she could role-play and get a critique of her performance to prepare for client meetings.

Gault, who works remotely from Pittsburgh, said these AI-powered tools help her prepare for customer interactions because she often lacks in-person colleagues to role-play with and receive feedback from.

The evolution of AI use at Salesforce

AI isn't new in Salesforce's operations, but its utility continues to change, Kris Billmaier, the executive vice president and general manager of Sales Cloud and growth products at Salesforce, told BI.

He said the company had invested in predictive and assistive AI tools, as well as autonomous AI agents.

For autonomous AI, Billmaier used the example of updating client statuses in Sales Cloud, Salesforce's platform for tracking sellers' statuses for each of their clients, from generating leads to closing deals. He said Salesforce's predictive AI used to make status-update recommendations based on its analysis of a sales lead's communications. To complete the process of approving and recording the status change, sellers had to review the AI's recommendation, then manually click "accept."

But as sellers became more acquainted with the AI's suggestions, Salesforce began to use autonomous agents for that process. Now sellers can set up an agent to approve their status changes without human intervention.

AI adoption requires employee awareness and accessibility

Bringing AI to a workplace so dependent on human connection is no easy feat. Marsden said it's a "new motion" many sellers aren't used to.

He said a solution is to ensure that AI-powered features are "living and breathing" in the tools that sellers use every day.

When, for example, a customer tells Gault that they're using HubSpot, a competing marketing software, she looks to the right-hand corner of her screen. There, her Sales Coach autonomous AI agent is already populating ways other sellers have tackled objections from HubSpot users.

Salesforce sellers can also find Slack's AI chatbot among their options for colleagues to message.

"There's a baked-in incentive for them to be really good at using AI so they can come across authentically in front of their customers," Marsden said.

"The human side is having the conversation, doing the discovery, and inquiring about what the customer's needs are," he said. "And then AI is there to complement, to help you make sure you captured all the needed feedback."

• Some financial institutions are prioritizing internal AI tools to enhance daily operations.
• For example, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America have trained staff to use AI with human supervision.
• This article is part of "AI in Action," a series exploring how companies are implementing AI innovations.

The financial industry's approach to artificial intelligence reveals considerable pragmatism.

Popular notions of generative AI, guided by the explosive growth of OpenAI's ChatGPT, often center on consumer-facing chatbots. But financial institutions are leaning more heavily on internal AI tools that streamline day-to-day tasks.

This requires training programs and user-experience design that help a bank's entire organization — from relationship bankers directing high-value accounts to associates — understand the latest AI technology.

From AI classification to AI generation

Banks have long used traditional AI and machine learning techniques for various functions, such as customer service bots and decision algorithms that provide a faster-than-human response to market swings.

But modern generative AI is different from prior AI/ML methods, and it has its own strengths and weaknesses. Hari Gopalkrishnan, Bank of America's chief information officer and head of retail, preferred, small business, and wealth technology, said generative AI is a new tool that offers new capabilities, rather than a replacement for prior AI efforts.

"We have a four-layer framework that we think about with regards to AI," Gopalkrishnan told Business Insider.

The first layer is rules-based automation that takes actions based on specific conditions, like collecting and preserving data about a declined credit card transaction when one occurs. The second is analytical models, such as those used for fraud detection. The third layer is language classification, which Bank of America used to build Erica, a virtual financial assistant, in 2016.

"Our journey of Erica started off with understanding language for the purposes of classification," Gopalkrishnan said. But the company isn't generating anything with Erica, he added: "We're classifying customer questions into buckets of intents and using those intents to take customers to the right part of the app or website to help them serve themselves."

The fourth layer, of course, is generative AI.

Koren Picariello, a Morgan Stanley managing director and its head of wealth management generative AI, said Morgan Stanley took a similar path. Throughout the 2010s, the company used machine learning for several purposes, like seeking investment opportunities that meet the needs and preferences of specific clients. Many of these techniques are still used.

"Historically, I was working in analytics, data, and innovation within the wealth space. In that space, Morgan Stanley did focus on the more traditional AI/ML tools," Picariello told BI. "Then in 2022, we started a dialogue with OpenAI before they became a household name. And that began our generative-AI journey."

How banks are deploying AI

Given the history, it'd be reasonable to think banks would turn generative-AI tools into new chatbots that more or less serve as better versions of Bank of America's Erica, or as autonomous financial advisors. But the most immediate changes instead came to internal processes and tools.

Morgan Stanley's first major generative-AI tool, Morgan Stanley Assistant, was launched in September 2023 for employees such as financial advisors and support staff who help clients manage their money. Powered by OpenAI's GPT-4, it was designed to give responses grounded in the company's library of over 100,000 research reports and documents.

The second tool, Morgan Stanley Debrief, was launched in June. It helps financial advisors create, review, and summarize notes from meetings with clients.

"It's kind of like having the most informed person at Morgan Stanley sitting next to you," Picariello said. "Because any question you have, whether it was operational in nature or research in nature, what we've asked the model to do is source an answer to the user based on our internal content."

Bank of America is pursuing similar applications, including a call center tool that saves customer associates' time by transcribing customer conversations in real time, classifying the customer's needs, and generating a summary for the agent.

Keeping humans in the loop

The decision to deploy generative AI internally first, rather than externally, was in part due to generative AI's most notable weakness: hallucinations.

In generative AI, a hallucination is an inaccurate or nonsensical response to a prompt, like when Google Search's AI infamously recommended that home chefs use glue to keep cheese from sliding off a pizza.

Banks are wary of consumer-facing AI chatbots that could make similar errors about bank products and policies.

Deploying generative AI internally lessens the concern. It's not used to autonomously serve a bank's customers and clients but to assist bank employees, who have the option to accept or reject its advice or assistance.

Bank of America provides AI tools that can help relationship bankers prep for a meeting with a client, but it doesn't aim to automate the bank-client relationship, Gopalkrishnan told BI.

Picariello said Morgan Stanley takes a similar approach to using generative AI while maintaining accuracy. The company's AI-generated meeting summaries could be automatically shared with clients, but they're not. Instead, financial advisors review them before they're sent.

Training the finance workforce for AI

Bank of America and Morgan Stanley are also training bank employees on how to use generative-AI tools, though their strategies diverge.

Gopalkrishnan said Bank of America takes a top-down approach to educating senior leadership about the potential and risks of generative AI.

About two years ago, he told BI, he helped top-level staff at the bank become "well aware" of what's possible with AI. He said having the company's senior leadership briefed on generative AI's perks, as well as its limitations, was important to making informed decisions across the company.

Meanwhile, Morgan Stanley is concentrating on making the company's AI tools easy to understand.

"We've spent a lot of time thinking through the UX associated with these tools, to make them intuitive to use, and taking users through the process and cycle of working with generative AI," Picariello said. "Much of the training is built into the workflow and the user experience." For example, Morgan Stanley's tools can advise employees on how to reframe or change a prompt to yield a better response.

For now, banks are focusing AI initiatives on identifying and automating increasingly more complex and nuanced tasks within the organizations rather than developing one-off applications targeted at the customer experience.

"We try to approach problems not as a technology problem but as a business problem. And the business problem is that Bank of America employees all perform lots of tasks in the company," said Gopalkrishnan. "The opportunity is to think more holistically, to understand the tasks and find the biggest opportunities so that five and 10 years from now, we're a far more efficient organization."

Twenty years ago, getting jobs in private equity was an ultra-niche choice for MBA grads at the prestigious Wharton School.

According to the school's career report for 2004, just over 4% of MBA students in that year's graduating class were headed for jobs in private equity and venture capital. By contrast, more than 23% had landed investment banking and brokerage jobs.

Today, it's a different story: Just over 15% of the 2024 class went to work at investment banks, while close to 13% took jobs with firms that invest in privately held companies.

To some extent, this isn't a surprise as businesses once viewed as the Wild West of finance catch up to long-standing bank behemoths in market share, power, and prestige. Blackstone has gone from managing about $32 million in assets two decades ago to more than $1 trillion today. Citadel's market-making arm now handles one in every four trades on the stock market.

As part of Business Insider's series on career paths in finance, we set out to learn how these transformations are shaping career aspirations and trajectories. Do the old strongholds of prestige still remain in the eyes of Gen Z? Or have opinions — and options — changed?

We surveyed undergraduate finance students and members of campus finance clubs — stepping stones to Wall Street internships — about their career tracks, expectations, and motivations. In addition to the 150 survey responses we received across about a dozen schools (which is not a scientifically representative sample), we interviewed about 30 students from schools such as the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, and New York University. They asked to be anonymous to protect their future careers.

A lot has changed, and at the same time, nothing really has. In our survey, names like Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan stuck out in popularity — but so did Centerview Partners, a boutique M&A shop, and Blackstone, the trillion-dollar alternative asset manager.

"I think the sentiment definitely is shifting," a Columbia University junior said. "The interest is more varied in terms of the old path of just, 'I want to go to a big bank.'"

When asked which financial firm or other employer they'd most like to work for, nearly an even number of respondants mentioned investment banks (59) and buy-side firms, a category that covers private equity firms and hedge funds (57). A good chunk of people — 28 — were unsure or unspecific about a dream firm. (These numbers don't add up to the 150 total respondents because not everyone answered this question, some answers were not applicable, and others mentioned multiple firms in their write-in answer.)

Across both banking and the buy side (so named because these firms tend to buy assets instead of selling products and services), a preference for brand names and large firms stood out.

Thirty-five responses mentioned the top 10 investment banks by assets, including JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs. Some of the reasons given included "reputation," "talented people to learn from," "prestige," and the ability to get an even better job down the road (known in the industry, and on the survey, as "exit opportunities").

Goldman Sachs was the most mentioned firm in the survey responses, with 14 write-in responses, followed by JPMorgan (12) as a close second.

Thirty-one responses mentioned the top 10 private equity firms by assets, including KKR, Blackstone, and Apollo. Another four mentioned the top 10 hedge funds by assets, including Citadel and Bridgewater. Reasons given included "higher pay and good preparation to one day start my own firm," "working on the biggest deals in the world," and "the ideal blend of prestige and work-life balance."

Of those, Blackstone, the world's largest alternative assets manager, was the standout for most votes (11).

One Columbia junior said he accepted an internship at a large bank because he's unsure which area of finance he wants to pursue long term.

"In the same firm, they are doing so many different things. They're engaging with these companies, and through multiple different touch points instead of doing just advisory," he said of his choice to work for one of the largest and most established banks, a category known as bulge bracket.

The Wharton student agreed.

"I don't know what I want to do. But I know I want to be in the finance industry," he said. "I want to learn as much as I possibly can. So if I were to design a perfect job right out of college, it honestly would be a bulge bracket investment banking job."

Our survey results and interviews found that smaller firms, including so-called boutique banks, were strong contenders. The Columbia junior, for example, described being torn between the bulge-bracket offer he accepted and an offer from a boutique bank.

When seeking advice about which one to choose, he noticed a generational divide.

"Almost all the young people I talked to, let's say ages 32 and below, said go to the boutique," he told BI about his experience. "Everyone 32 and above said go to the bulge bracket."

When asked which finance firm or other employer they would most like to work for and why, 26 respondents mentioned non-bulge-bracket banks, including the boutique firms Centerview, Evercore, and Perella Weinberg.

Centerview, which advised Paramount on its $28 billion merger with Skydance in 2024, is known for being one of the highest payers for junior analysts on the street. It was the fourth-most-written-in response, with nine students saying they aspired to work there.

Boutique banks tend to focus on specific business lines or even industries, like entertainment or tech. These firms have developed a reputation for giving young bankers more hands-on deal experience, better work-life balance, and, in some cases, better pay.

The Columbia junior, for example, highlighted what he saw as a greater opportunity to stand out at a smaller firm. "You're not going to be a cog in a wheel simply because the denominator is smaller, you are now more important, you get to do more."

Another Columbia student, a sophomore, said boutique banks were the new mark of prestige among some of his classmates, while describing bulge brackets as the "baseline."

"It's like, OK, Columbia has been a target school for bulge brackets for however long, but the new name brands on the street are different now. It's Centerview, it's Moelis, and it's Evercore," he said.

The smaller-is-better crowd was also visible on the buy side. Twenty-nine responses mentioned firms that are smaller than the top 10 private equity firms or hedge funds by assets, including buy-side shops like Warburg Pincus, Silver Point Capital, and Hellman & Friedman. The reasons given included "excellent culture," "meaningful work," and "better work-life balance."

Students were also asked to share their dream finance jobs — not the one they expect to have upon graduation, but the one they want down the road. Buy-side jobs were the most popular: Eighty-five answers (equivalent to about 57% of respondents) mentioned private equity, hedge funds, or venture capital in some way.

The recruiting process for these some of these jobs can get pretty intense. According to the students BI spoke with, the benefits include more interesting work and slightly less grueling hours.

Autonomy and leadership also featured prominently among the survey responses, with 29 writing about entrepreneurship, running their own business, or holding a C-suite position.

These write-in answers included aspirations like being an "entrepreneur," "starting my own business," "running my own investment firm," and becoming a "CFO of a Fortune 500 company" or "CIO of a hedge fund."

Many of these answers overlapped with buy-side aspirations — like the students who said their dream was to "own my own hedge fund," or "run my own small PE firm."

Notably, just 15 answers about long-term dream jobs in finance mentioned banking.

About a dozen responses reflected uncertainty or long-term ambitions elsewhere, like in corporate law. A handful of those answers also expressed some of the values Gen Z is widely known for, saying they wanted to have a job that allowed them to "take time off while maintaining a life/raising a family," "be happy with where I work everyday," and "use finance for social good."

(Again, these numbers don't add up to the 150 total respondents because not everyone answered this question, some answers were not applicable, and others mentioned multiple dream jobs in their write-in answer.)

The Columbia junior doesn't know what he wants to do long term within finance, but he summed up his dream job this way:

"I just think dealing with the most complex problems, in whatever respective space you're in, is the ideal job for me," he said. "That's what gets me excited."

Want to share your career path with us? Fill out this quick form.

Artificial intelligence is here. Whether it's chatbots, predictive analytics, robotic process automation, or generative design, AI is reshaping how businesses operate across industries.

So what does it take to implement AI at scale? A sound strategy is the simple answer, but accomplishing that is far more complex.

At the core of these AI innovations are company leaders and employees who leverage their resources and build infrastructures to advance these technologies.

Business Insider's series "AI in Action" examines how organizations are integrating AI into the workplace through employee feedback and training, data-security procedures, financial strategies, and more.

As our stories explore how AI is being used in operations such as supply chains, human resources onboarding procedures, marketing and sales, and pharmaceutical development, one thing is clear: Diligent collaboration is key to making AI a functional part of workers' lives.

Read the stories ahead for a behind-the-scenes look at innovation driven by high-level strategy and practical execution.

• Worker and job-site safety are key factors that construction management firms must consider daily.
• The Boston-based firm Shawmut does this with AI-powered software connected to workers' phones.
• This article is part of "AI in Action," a series exploring how companies are implementing AI innovations.

As a $2 billion construction management firm overseeing more than 150 active worksites on any given day, Shawmut Design and Construction is responsible for keeping roughly 30,000 employees, contractors, and subcontractors safe.

The Boston-based firm has employed AI for about eight years, using it for data collection, risk evaluation, worker safety compliance, and more.

Shaun Carvalho, the company's chief safety officer, said this strategy had become invaluable for creating a safer operation overall while still prioritizing growth and efficiency.

"You're talking about a business that, quite literally, 20 or 30 years ago was driven by paper and clipboards," Carvalho told Business Insider. "Anything we can do to leverage technology, we'll do it."

Using data and AI to promote safety at construction sites

Shawmut uses artificial intelligence to predict safety-related incidents on its construction sites.

With the help of an AI tool created by a private vendor, Shawmut can pull various data points to help score the likelihood of something going awry.

Some of this data is from the National Weather Service — information about forecast temperatures, prospective weather events, and the associated fallout, such as freezing pipes. Other data is about personnel: If there's an influx of new people to a job site, but not an influx of new leaders, the AI system will flag it as potential for disaster.

"Not having enough leaders means we probably aren't getting enough eyeballs on the workers who are out there now," Carvalho said. "When your job is to keep everyone safe, eyeballs are a very good thing."

This data dump isn't in real time, at least not yet. The drops come at least once a day, empowering leaders to speak with teams and make appropriate tweaks, Carvalho said.

Pairing GPS data with AI capabilities

Shawmut has been using AI since 2017, Carvalho said. The program really took off during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the company devised innovative ways to leverage the technology to ensure worker safety.

The firm's chief people and administration officer, Marianne Monte, told BI that the company used GPS tracking software on workers' phones to monitor their location on job sites. An AI engine automatically sent alerts when workers got closer than 6 feet apart.

Gradually, the company has expanded this use case to track whether workers are tied off on buildings (so they don't fall) and whether workers are using scaffolding properly.

"These tools feel very benign to me, and they are making our job sites safer," Monte told SAP. "It's much less about the height of that ladder than it is about a person's mental state when they get on it."

Privacy rights are a key consideration in the age of AI

While AI can help construction businesses like Shawmut keep sites safe, some experts have raised ethical questions about using AI in this fashion.

Benjamin Lange, who studies the intersection of technology and ethics, said leveraging AI to essentially monitor people raises concerns about privacy, informed consent, and data security, which must be carefully managed to prevent misuse or overreach.

"Companies must be transparent about data collection practices, ensure that tracking is strictly limited to safety purposes, and provide workers with opt-in mechanisms to maintain trust and protect individual autonomy and workers' privacy rights," said Lange, a research assistant professor in the ethics of AI at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and a researcher leader at the Munich Center for Machine Learning.

After hearing this feedback, Shawmut representatives decided to anonymize data from the jump.

What's next for AI in construction

AI in construction faces several challenges, including data reliability and lack of human oversight.

"There are also concerns about overreliance on automation, which may reduce human oversight and accountability in critical decision-making," Lange said.

AI systems rely on high-quality, accurate data, and any errors or biases in datasets can lead to costly mistakes or unsafe conditions, Carvalho said. Additionally, construction sites may vary widely in complexity, making it difficult for AI models trained on past projects to generalize effectively, he added.

Recent industry research indicates that bad data in the construction industry is a big hurdle for companies attempting to embrace AI. A recent report by Autodesk and FMI Consulting indicated that poor data — information that is "incomplete, inaccurate, inconsistent, or outdated," according to the report — costs the industry $1.8 trillion annually. That same report said that 95% of all construction data goes unused.

Still, Shawmut is planning to extend and amplify its AI programs over the next three to five months, Carvalho said.

One push: real-time response. Carvalho imagines a future where every Shawmut employee wears a badge linked to a digital map of a job site. In this world, the AI system would alert managers in real time the moment an employee stepped out near something dangerous.

"What we want isn't actually in the marketplace yet," Carvalho said.

He added that he'd like to see AI technology that accounts for the various rules and regulations that differ by state. If, for instance, a contractor is on a Shawmut job in California and then heads to a job in Utah, this dream system would automatically update the job site policies to reflect the rules and regulations in the new municipality.

A system like this one would also have the potential to contribute to job safety.

"No ads, no hosts, no sponsors, just games." The Triple-i Initiative's pitch for its now-annual showcase of games, crafted by studios working somewhere between "Solo dev or very small team" and "Investor-minded conglomerate with international offices," promises a lot of peeks at games without a lot of chatter, and once again it delivered.

Last year's showcase debuted titles like Norland, Slay the Spire 2, and The Rogue Prince of Persia, along with updates from Darkest Dungeon 2, Palworld, and Vampire Survivors. This year featured looks at titles from the Deep Rock universe, the cloning-yourself-to-survive curiosity The Alters, an Endless Legend 2 that continues tweaking the 4X formula, and more.

Below are five selected highlights for the Ars crowd, along with some notable other announcements. The full list is not yet up on the Triple-i site, but you can see what jumped out from the full showcase.

Read full article

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• When company leaders introduce AI to their workforces, they often face employee skepticism.
• Colgate-Palmolive and Rent a Mac use employee feedback and data to address AI pushback.
• This article is part of "AI in Action," a series exploring how companies are implementing AI innovations.

When leaders at Colgate-Palmolive were ready to roll out an AI Hub for employees this past summer, they knew exactly what they wanted to avoid: a small group of people implementing an AI strategy assuming they knew the best use cases for each department and pushing an AI system onto the rest of the organization.

That kind of approach "puts a bad taste in people's mouths" and can create "a huge amount of friction," said Kli Pappas, the senior director of global predictive analytics and head of AI at Colgate-Palmolive.

Instead of a top-down method, the company created an internal hub through which anyone in the organization could input their natural language with instructions to build a personalized AI assistant and solve inefficient processes in their day-to-day work.

Colgate's strategy avoided one of the biggest barriers companies face when adopting AI: employee pushback, hesitation, or resistance.

Managing how employees experience change "is without a doubt the toughest part" of an AI implementation, much more so than the technology itself, said David Hilborn, a managing partner at the consulting firm West Monroe Partners. Hilborn is also the firm's organization, people, and change practice leader, so he often sees companies fail to devote enough resources to implement changes or lack a clear game plan to manage the people side of an AI initiative.

"That always leads to adoption failures," Hilborn said. "Leaders have to be thinking about the people dimension."

The big unknown: How AI affects me

Employee resistance to AI usually stems from a lack of understanding, Hilborn said. When employees don't grasp how the technology works or how it might change expectations for their roles, they often worry about losing control of responsibilities or even being displaced from their jobs.

Sometimes managers don't fully understand AI themselves, which creates "lumpy leader support" and sows greater uncertainty among teams, said Hilborn.

Without a communication plan, clear expectations on role changes, and the ability to provide feedback, employees face what Tarja Stephens, the founder of the business consultancy AI Opportunity, described as "change fatigue," leaving workers exhausted by tech overhauls.

"They resist, not because they don't want to innovate, but because they really do not have the clarity of how implementing AI will affect their roles," Stephens said.

Rent a Mac, a company that provides access to Apple devices, launched an AI-driven inventory management system in 2023. But Luca Dal Zotto, the cofounder of Rent a Mac, said the company made the mistake of publicizing the AI program prematurely without giving employees enough training or context.

"Anxiety filled the space," Dal Zotto said.

Staff feared losing their jobs, while others questioned the tech's accuracy. Three departments — customer support, procurement, and warehouse operations — resisted AI and only begrudgingly used it. Dal Zotto said that led to a seven-week delay in implementation and cost about $85,000 in expected efficiency savings.

Hilborn has seen instances like this, where an AI implementation doesn't work and leaders have to "go back to the drawing board," he said. "That is very, very, very costly."

Making AI about the people

Upon seeing the resistance, Rent a Mac changed its approach. It identified "AI champions" within the organization — employees trained on AI who could show the tangible benefits of the technology, "reducing their peers' anxiety," Dal Zotto said. For example, warehouse crews found the AI system cut order processing time by 37%.

With its revised AI strategy, Rent a Mac's employee engagement with the automated system rose from 31% to 89% in three months. Now, the program makes about three-fourths of the inventory decisions, freeing employees to manage exceptions and take care of customer service.

Dal Zotto said the biggest lesson he learned was that deploying AI requires investment in technology strategy and people strategy.

AI beyond the IT department

Each company's approach will differ, but Stephens generally recommends a few steps to implement AI in a people-centric way: Keep the narrative around job enhancement not replacement; set clear expectations around how it will affect people's roles; and let employees experiment and offer feedback.

In developing its AI strategy, Colgate-Palmolive looked to its corporate values and code of conduct around workplace culture.

"Everyone should be able to decide for themselves how AI is going to impact their own job and their own tasks," Pappas said.

The company's AI Hub focuses on job-specific use cases — like sorting data or writing copy — rather than technicalities like AI-model types, so employees can build AI assistants that suit their needs. Colgate tells employees to think of it as if they're providing instructions to an intern.

"You don't have to know anything about GenAI," Pappas said.

After launching the hub in July, employees built about 3,000 AI assistants in the second half of 2024. Employees share what they've built so colleagues can see how many people are using the tool and related metrics, such as the number of hours saved, and then decide whether to use it themselves.

Pappas said marketing employees have built AI assistants to help with writing brand copy. A team member wrote thousands of lines of a programming language with an AI assistant, shrinking a year's worth of work into two months.

Manufacturing plant workers have used AI to identify equipment issues and explain the solution in their local language rather than receiving an error code and having to search for solutions in a manual, he said.

"There's lots of small day-to-day things that AI is good at helping people with," Pappas said. "Everyone gets value from it in their own unique way."

• AI is streamlining onboarding processes for companies of various sizes.
• At Hitachi and Texans Credit Union, AI saves time and boosts engagement in the new-hire experience.
• This article is part of "AI in Action," a series exploring how companies are implementing AI innovations.

When your organization has nearly 300,000 global employees across the US, Japan, and Europe, many of whom work remotely, how do you manage onboarding new hires?

That scenario presented Hitachi with challenges to keep new employees engaged, but also an opportunity to overhaul its onboarding with an AI digital assistant this past fall.

Hitachi — along with smaller companies like Texans Credit Union — is incorporating AI into onboarding to save time and reduce delays. AI-assisted onboarding is common in tech companies, but it's also important in high-growth firms that are rapidly adding many employees, said Edie Goldberg, the president and founder of the human resources consulting firm E. L. Goldberg & Associates.

On the back end with human resources, artificial intelligence can help arrange paperwork for new hires to sign and trigger notifications to various departments. For employees, AI could take the form of a chatbot available 24/7 to answer new-hire questions in natural language.

"Employees work all over the place in different time zones," Goldberg said. "Something that's going to answer your question when you need it is really helpful."

As HR and tech leaders apply AI to onboarding, the key is to have a clear plan of what problems the technology can solve, metrics for success, and a test-and-learn mentality that spans departments.

Useful AI implementation starts with honest conversations about pain points

Business leaders looking to integrate AI into employee onboarding processes should first identify pain points, Bala Krishnapillai, the vice president and head of the IT group for the Americas at Hitachi, told Business Insider.

While AI applications can certainly improve productivity, the technology is "like a shiny object," Krishnapillai said, adding: "Everyone wants to get into AI." Determining problems can inform research and conversations that lead to selecting or building a way to fulfill a company's specific needs.

At Texans Credit Union, leaders identified a major operational problem: Its logins and system access weren't ready for employees when they started, Jenni Short, the financial institution's chief people officer, said.

"We spent a lot of time making sure that their desk looked nice," Short said. "But, oh, you can't actually log in to the computer."

In September, the firm added robotic process automation to its onboarding, which ensured new hires had access to systems. The process took about six months and started with HR collaborating closely with IT.

"The HR department had five people in it, and no one had the skill set to build or necessarily understand all of the things that we could do," Short said. IT came up with the idea to apply robotic process automation to new hires' logins.

Texans Credit Union's main performance metric for the automation project was the amount of time saved. Before automation, setting up access took 15 to 20 minutes per new hire. Now it takes less than a minute. Managers can also spend less time on administrative work and more time welcoming their hires, and those employees can get acclimated right away.

"Everything is ready for them," Short said, adding that hires could "focus on learning as opposed to trying to figure out how to log in."

Hitachi identified its pain point as process delays. Onboarding employees took 10 to 15 days and involved many manual forms, such as a notice to IT to get the new employee's laptop set up or to facilities to ensure the person had an ID badge and a desk if they worked on-site. New hires' questions weren't answered in real time, which risked the company losing their engagement.

Hitachi uses time reduction as a key performance indicator, Krishnapillai said. The IT department conducted market research and built a private AI system with a custom large language model. Workers fed the model with data from corporate sites, PowerPoint presentations, PDF files, and employment books so that it could accurately answer new hires' questions.

IT then worked with HR to beta test the AI onboarding agents with various departments. Once KPIs and service-level agreements were met, teams scaled the AI for onboarding in October after the roughly six-month process.

The results: saving four days in onboarding and reducing HR staff involvement from 20 hours per new hire to 12 hours, said Krishnapillai.

Customizing AI to match companies' needs

What excites many leaders about AI in onboarding is the ability to customize the technology to their unique needs, Goldberg of E. L. Goldberg & Associates said.

"AI has various flavors," Krishnapillai said, adding that companies could look at their technological maturity to determine where and how to start with AI. One "flavor" is generative AI, such as ChatGPT, which is a relatively simple application to adopt. Agentic AI, which acts autonomously and makes decisions, may be more advanced.

Goldberg said many companies start with automating rudimentary processes, like setting up email or assigning equipment. Automated nudges can notify a new hire or HR if a person hasn't signed a document or completed an assigned training.

"All these little tasks are very routine, and they're just perfect for AI," Goldberg told BI.

Texans Credit Union plans to eventually automate more HR functions, such as assigning a desk or parking space, Short said. Right now, these processes require multiple email interactions to be completed.

Ultimately, Goldberg said, any AI application a company deploys needs to meet predetermined metrics and enhance the new employee's onboarding experience.

"It's not just that it's administratively easier for HR," Goldberg said, adding that the hires should see the benefits of autofilling multiple forms or gaining quick access to FAQs: "It's really in service of creating a better experience for that new employee."

• Pharmaceutical giants such as J&J, Merck, and Eli Lilly are embracing AI and prioritizing upskilling.
• They hope that training thousands of employees on generative AI will boost productivity in drug development.
• This article is part of "AI in Action," a series exploring how companies are implementing AI innovations.

Johnson & Johnson is embracing the concept of a bilingual employee — but not in the classic sense.

For the pharmaceutical company, literacy is needed in specialized and core job skills, including research, supply chain, and finance. Then there's fluency in AI technology.

"There are so many ways we've been using AI," said Jim Swanson, the chief information officer of J&J. "But to do that effectively, we had to really create a curriculum and a mindset around upskilling."

More than 56,000 of J&J's 138,000 workers have taken a generative AI training course, which is required before any employee is authorized to use the technology. After training, J&J's employees can utilize generative AI tools for summarization and prompt engineering, the latter a skill to ask the right question to get the best output from a large language model. A separate, more in-depth digital boot camp that covers topics including AI, augmented reality, and automation has recorded more than 37,000 cumulative hours of training from more than 14,000 employees.

Generative AI offers the promise of more quickly identifying compounds for new treatments and vaccines, accelerating drug development, streamlining regulatory compliance, optimizing which patients are best suited for clinical trials, and improving how new drugs are marketed.

Deborah Golden, Deloitte's US chief innovation officer, said these advancements were poised to change which skills the pharmaceutical industry prioritizes in recruitment. Biology and chemistry knowledge will still be needed, but it isn't as essential for newer roles like AI engineers, and other new roles might require a mix of traditional expertise and AI know-how if AI-driven drug discovery proliferates.

"When you think about how AI is shifting the balance and the talent requirements, you really need to be able to speak both the language of biology and AI models," Golden said.

How AI is changing drug development

Generative AI could save the pharmaceutical industry tens of billions of dollars each year through improved productivity within drug development.

J&J, the maker of treatments like the immunosuppressive drug Stelara and Darzalex, a medication for treating the cancer multiple myeloma, has used more traditional forms of AI for almost a decade. Use cases include AI-enabled software tools that can guide a surgeon through a procedure, speed up drug discovery, and help drug makers manage inventory more effectively.

In 2023, J&J piloted a six-week digital immersion program that focused on AI, data science, and other emerging technologies. More than 2,500 employees participated last year, taking 90-minute classes each week, and J&J is planning further expansion this year.

Swanson told Business Insider it was critical for company leaders to create a culture that promotes technological literacy. "We've been around 135 years. We've had to reinvent ourselves multiple times to stay relevant and current," he said.

The pharmaceutical giant Merck's early generative AI investments included the development of a proprietary platform called GPTeal. Merck — which is responsible for the HPV vaccine Gardasil and the immunotherapy drug Keytruda — said that GPTeal gives employees access to large language models such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, Meta's Llama, and Anthropic's Claude while keeping company data secure from external exposures.

Employees are also using generative AI to draft emails and memos and for other productivity-focused tasks, but Merck's aspirations are also getting bolder.

"Now, the journey is clearly to identify, implement, track, and measure use cases that have a dramatic impact on our business," said Ron Kim, a senior vice president and the chief technology officer of Merck.

Generative AI allows Merck's employees more time to focus on higher-impact tasks. In drug discovery, for example, generative AI can help draft (human-reviewed) regulatory documents that are submitted to health authorities. "We felt like some of our scientists were taking time being copyeditors," Kim said. "That's not what they trained for."

Kim said more than 50,000 Merck employees were using GPTeal regularly. The company supported upskilling through a mix of self-serve digital training courses, monthly webcasts focused on generative AI, and boot camps for software developers that could last anywhere from half a day to 10 days.

AI can appeal to pharmaceutical companies of various sizes

Dr. Daniel Stevens, the chief medical officer at Blue Earth Therapeutics, said AI was alluring to the clinical-stage radiopharmaceutical company because, as a small startup founded in 2021, it has to be judicious with how it spends capital.

"The application of artificial intelligence is of interest, because it may help us with some of our efficiency goals," Stevens said.

A $76.5 million Series A in October, which included funding from the healthcare investment firm Soleus Capital and the diagnostic imaging company Bracco Diagnostics, was mostly intended to support clinical trials that will assess the safety and effectiveness of new prostate cancer treatments.

Stevens said that with just 20 full-time employees, Blue Earth has not yet needed to offer AI upskill training. He added that when Blue Earth grows its employee base and is ready to offer instruction about the technology, it plans to use online courses and AI certifications from external vendors.

Eli Lilly, the pharmaceutical giant behind treatments including the antidepressant Prozac and the type 2 diabetes and weight loss medicine Mounjaro, has used generative AI to support the research of both small and large molecules. The company also used AI to generate documentation for clinical trials and create materials for regulatory submissions.

After ChatGPT launched, major employers such as Apple and Amazon restricted employee use of the popular chatbot, with many citing concerns about data privacy. "We went in the exact opposite direction," said Diogo Rau, the chief information and digital officer at Eli Lilly.

Rau encouraged Eli Lilly's workforce to embrace the tool without exposing sensitive company information, similar to how an employee might use Google Search.

"We told everybody you need to use it, you need to start bringing ChatGPT into your work," said Rau. But, he added, "Don't put anything in there that you don't want to get out."

The company also internally sought to bolster interest with an "AI Games" competition timed to the Summer Olympics in Paris. Contests involved using a chatbot to write a message to a colleague or relying on generative AI to make a quiz about Eli Lilly's history.

In 2024, Eli Lilly also encouraged all employees and managers to use generative AI for their year-end reviews. This year, the company is set to require all senior leaders and managers to obtain an AI certification.

"We've got a workforce that is embracing AI," Rau said, adding that employees often stopped him in the office or emailed him to share the ways they were applying AI to their daily work tasks.

• Recruiting firm Prospect Rock Partners surveyed over 900 bankers, from boutiques to bulge brackets.
• BI obtained some of the results, including how much bankers in varying groups and levels made.
• See which titles and coverage areas saw the biggest pay bumps in 2024 as dealmaking rebounded.

Psst! How much was your bonus?

On Wall Street, your end-of-year paycheck can often indicate your standing at work. Yet, knowing where your bonus pay ranks compared to peers is not so simple.

In an effort to shed some light on Wall Street pay trends, recruiting firm Prospect Rock Partners surveyed more than 900 investment bankers about their 2024 salaries and bonuses.

The survey was conducted between December 1, 2024 and February 28, 2025 using Prospect Rock's banking industry contacts. It's the third year Meridith Dennes, the firm's managing partner, has conducted it.

"It's always been so cryptic," Dennes told Business Insider about the Wall Street compensation structure. "The whole point of the survey is that compensation is much more nuanced than what people talk about."

Survey respondents included bankers from all ranks, from analysts up to vice presidents and managing directors, and across a multitude of coverage groups, and firms.

Prospect Rock Partners gave BI permission to publish select slides from its full survey. The results shared here suggest that so-called elite boutique banks (think Evercore, Lazard, and Centerview) saw total compensation increases of between 11% to 68% across all roles. Total pay for associates at elite boutiques rose an average of 31% for first-year associates and 33% for second-year associates. Managing director compensation at elite boutiques jumped from about $1 million in 2023 to over $1.7 million in 2024, an increase of 68%.

These bonus insights come as Wall Street waits with bated breath to see whether the M&A rebound many industry experts predicted for 2025 will fully materialize or fizzle out.

"There's so much uncertainty — geopolitical risk, the impact on the private sector of DOGE cuts, tariffs, and the interest rate environment — which can cause a lot of turmoil in the market," Dennes said.

The investment banking hiring surge that started at the end of 2024 continues, however, Dennes said.

"I, as a recruiter, am seeing an increase in job requisitions coming in, but it's much harder to find talent than what people want," she said. "More companies who haven't used recruiters in the last two years are coming out of the woodwork now."

2024 compensation overview

This portion of the survey gives the average 2024 compensation for survey respondents at all investment banking levels.

The most junior employees — first-year analysts — averaged a base pay of more than $110,000. The data also suggests that most analysts earned a bonus that equaled about 50% of their base pay in 2024.

Higher-level bankers —  vice presidents and up — generally earned bonuses equal to or higher than their base pay. The biggest gains went to group heads, who are usually managing directors and partners. They saw average bonuses of more than $1.7 million.

What bulge-brackets are paying associates

Bulge-bracket firms are the largest banks, which tend to handle the biggest deals and, therefore, have the largest investment banking teams. These firms tend to include Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, and Citigroup.

Associates are the second-most junior rank at an investment bank after analysts. This chart shows that associate-level survey respondents who work at bulge brackets earned between $176,000 and $221,000 in base pay for 2024. They reported higher bonuses in 2024 over 2023.

What middle-market banks are paying associates

Middle-market bankers tend to focus on smaller clients, often those with annual revenue of under $1 billion. This cohort included banks like William Blair, Piper Sandler, Oppenheimer, and Baird, Dennes said.

The average 2024 base pay for associate bankers at these firms was lower than at bulge brackets — but not by very much. The average 2024 bonus for each position was even more for this cohort than for survey respondents who work at bulge brackets.

What 'elite boutiques' are paying associates

Associate-level bankers who work at "elite boutiques" take the cake for the highest average 2024 base pay and bonus, reporting higher numbers than their peers at bulge brackets and middle-market firms.

Elite boutiques are considered the top-tier boutique banks that can compete with the big firms. In 2024, Evercore, Centerview, and Lazard, for example, snagged top 10 positions on the league tables for both global and US M&A advice, according to M&A tracker LSEG.

Survey respondents from this group work at firms like Evercore, Centerview, Lazard, PJT Partners, and Moelis.

More details on 'elite boutique' pay

These banks tend to focus solely on investment banking versus larger firms, which may have consumer banking and asset management services. Some boutiques also focus on deals within a specific sector, like media, telecom, or healthcare.

That means they often have stronger execution abilities, said Dennes, and therefore higher fee income per banker on their leaner teams.

"One of the most significant findings is the clear correlation between increased compensation in 2024 and recovering deal volumes," she wrote in an overview section of the survey's findings. "This recovery appears most pronounced at elite boutiques, where compensation is directly tied to deal performance and revenue generation."

Pay by industry group in 2023 & 2024

Second-year associates, whose 2024 comp is described in this section of the survey results, are bankers who have been in the field for anywhere from two to five years, depending on whether they started in investment banking as an analyst or were hired out of an MBA program.

The largest group of respondents in this group described themselves as as M&A generalists. The survey says this cohort averaged $187,000 in base pay and about $134,000 in bonus last year.

Others well-paid associates in this group worked in business services, restructuring, and DCM.

Some overall comp is down from years ago

The report shows how average comp has changed since 2022. In some cases, it wasn't for the better, like for vice presidents and managing directors.

For context, global dealmaking hit more than $3.16 trillion in 2024, which is up 10% over 2023, but still lower than 2022 volumes of $3.45 trillion, according to deals tracker LSEG.

• In a Deloitte survey, 26% of leaders said their organizations were seriously exploring autonomous agents.
• ServiceNow, SAP, and Salesforce are among the firms that have debuted AI agents to do work tasks.
• This article is part of "AI in Action," a series exploring how companies are implementing AI innovations.

When clients of the cloud-based-software provider ServiceNow contact the company's customer support center, 80% of the cases — in the form of calls and chat messages — are handled without any human intervention.

Instead, the company relies on analytical and generative artificial intelligence — in the form of AI agents — to address common customer questions.

Chris Bedi, ServiceNow's chief customer officer and enterprise-AI advisor, said employees still handle one out of every five customer-support requests.

They're getting new support from agentic AI, which can automate tasks such as drafting a response email to a customer. Workers remain in the loop for a final sign-off before any agentic-AI actions are executed. The combination of human workers and agentic AI shrank the amount of time it took to handle the more complex cases by 52% in a two-week period, ServiceNow said.

OpenAI's cofounder Sam Altman and other leading technologists have said that 2025 will be the year that AI agents "join" the workforce.

In addition to ServiceNow, software developers such as Salesforce and SAP have rolled out their own agentic-AI platforms. These can perform workplace tasks such as processing customer invoices, providing customer support to clients, and drafting emails. The business software giant Intuit, which owns TurboTax and QuickBooks, began rolling out agentic-AI capabilities in December.

Humans mostly remain in the loop for now, but vendors anticipate this technology will become fully autonomous. Multiagent systems, where two or more AI agents collaborate to complete work, will proliferate.

"Agents are the next level of understanding around how you apply AI," Jim Rowan, the head of AI at the consultancy Deloitte, said. "It can perform actions for you."

In a recent Deloitte survey of 2,773 business leaders, 26% of respondents said their organizations were exploring autonomous agents to a "large or very large extent."

Why AI agents have become the new focus for generative AI

For the first two years of the generative-AI boom — which kicked off after the debut of OpenAI's ChatGPT in late 2022 — most businesses that adopted the technology scaled it to power chatbots and complete routine tasks like drafting meeting summaries. AI agents represent an evolution of generative-AI technology, built to complete tasks autonomously, though most are still monitored closely by workers.

Agentic AI "actually possesses some unique skills around reasoning, planning, and orchestration," Bedi told Business Insider. "These agents can collaborate with each other and really start to deliver on the promise of work happening autonomously."

Buzz for AI agents kicked into high gear after Salesforce debuted Agentforce in September to automate tasks in customer support, sales, and marketing. The company has said it will roll out 1 billion agents to customers by the end of this year. The company also reported that more than 340,000 of its customer support questions had been answered autonomously with Agentforce.

ServiceNow estimates that the company's AI agents, already deployed in various parts of the business, such as customer service, human resources, and IT, are driving an estimated $325 million in annualized value by bolstering workplace productivity by 20%. ServiceNow says AI-agent-supported work saves 400,000 labor hours annually.

Still, technology companies are in the early stages of their agentic-AI development. Many are figuring out which processes they can fully automate with the technology. As a result, company leaders implementing agentic AI are training their workers to collaborate with — and provide feedback on — their new "coworkers."

AI agents are often developed as worker-collaboration tools

John Kucera, the senior vice president of product management at Salesforce, recommended that businesses be transparent about what work AI agents can handle and what will remain with workers. He added that businesses should be clear about what an AI agent actually is, saying that not all agentic systems are equal.

"There's a lot of false agents out there," Kucera said. "It's only an agent when you're taking a request and the agent is figuring out what to do and then what data to put in."

While surveys frequently find that many workers worry that AI will replace them, technologists say AI agents won't replace people but assume responsibility for mundane tasks.

"These agents are going to help me do my job, but at no point will they make me do something I'm not aware of," said Walter Sun, the global head of AI at SAP, which sells software for financial, supply chain, and other business management needs. "The most important thing is that the employees are always in control."

How companies are tailoring AI agents with employee feedback

To ensure workers have a voice in how AI agents are developed, SAP encourages employees across its various business lines — including the travel- and expense-management provider Concur and SuccessFactors, which provides HR, payroll, and talent management software — to use an internal online form to reach out to the AI team and propose compelling agentic use cases.

At Intuit, the AI-powered financial assistant Intuit Assist can get businesses paid 45% faster by detecting past-due invoices and automatically drafting a personalized reminder note. After a business owner approves the note's language and sends it out, they are paid, on average, five days sooner than with a human-only process, Intuit Assist said.

But before Inuit Assist takes action, humans have the final say. "What we're trying to do is have the right human-automation interaction," Ashok Srivastava, Intuit's chief data officer, said.

Intuit has embraced a robust AI-training program, focused on responsible AI and what the technology can and cannot do, and built a "sandbox" called GenStudio that allows employees to interact with large language models in a secure environment. The company has also developed educational programs tailored to senior executives, directors, and engineers. "It's very pervasive across the company," Srivastava added.

Asana, which makes work-management software, launched AI agents in October, focusing on a few functions, including marketing, IT, HR, and research and development. Rather than track a specific number of actions that agentic AI takes over, Asana monitors the types of work that can be automated, eliminating the drudgery of busy work to allow employees to focus on more complex tasks.

The company is also keeping a close eye on which tasks AI systems get wrong compared with people. In cybersecurity, human errors tend to occur later in the day, when workers are tired after a long shift. AI doesn't get tired, but it is susceptible to hallucinations — or when an AI model generates a response that is misleading or false information but nonetheless presents it as fact. For example, Asana's AI agent might respond to certain questions by suggesting tasks that are, in reality, nonexistent to a particular workflow.

"The kinds of errors we see are different, so the way we fix them needs to be different," Asana's chief information security officer, Sean Cassidy, said. He said the company conducts automated tests to detect hallucinations and improve the product when they occur.

For AI agents to create a compelling return on investment for the companies that implement them, Deloitte's Rowan said, workers should be tasked with frequently checking on simple automated tasks before any agentic AI actions are taken.

If businesses want to see big returns on their agentic AI investment, they need to place AI at the center of their work model, and then consider how humans will engage with the work, Rowan said. If not, "the savings really won't be there," he added.

ServiceNow's Bedi said the success of AI agents depends on companies nailing three factors: New agentic capabilities should be developed for each department and its specific needs, unique training plans should be designed for every part of the business — like finance, marketing, and sales — and the value and return on of agentic workflows should be closely monitored.

"The companies that combine all three of those ingredients are going to have a competitive advantage," Bedi said.

• Antoine Sallis was rejected for a car loan because his credit score was 378.
• About a decade later, he was a millionaire.
• He repaired his credit and used debt to build wealth.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Antoine Sallis, author of "The Great American Credit Secret: Part 2." It has been edited for length and clarity.

The best thing that ever happened to my finances felt like the worst thing possible at the time. I was in my late 20s, working as a sales rep at Teen Mobile. I was proud of that job and felt like I was making moves. My next step was to get a decent car, better than the $300 cars from Craigslist that I'd driven in the past.

One day, I walked by a dealership with a sign that said, "Your job is your credit." I took that to mean that as long as I had a job, I could get approved for a loan. I already knew I'd have to go somewhere lenient to get a car loan, but this seemed perfect. I didn't think I had any credit, but I definitely had a job.

To make the purchase even more of a slam dunk, I saved a $500 down payment and picked the cheapest car on the lot, which cost about $9,000. I strolled in to apply, filling out the long paper application. I waited for about 20 minutes. Then, the sales rep came out, barely containing his laugh. He told me my credit score was 378 — so low that I was an exception to their rule, and they couldn't give me a loan despite my job.

I learned about the potential of responsible debt

I walked out of there feeling dejected. I'd been planning to drive off that lot. On my bus ride home, I started thinking about credit, which I knew basically nothing about.

I got tunnel vision, and started to learn everything I could about credit. I started with books and videos. Later, I called people who worked in finance, offering them $60 to answer my questions for 30 minutes.

I cleaned up my own credit, which started with understanding why it was so bad. Once I pulled my credit report, I saw I had unresolved accounts I didn't even know about and student loans with late payments. I started paying my debts on time to build a positive credit history. Soon, people began asking me to help them understand theirs.

As I learned more, I realized credit could be an incredible tool. Once my credit score was better, I took loans to invest in real estate. Most people think debt is bad. But I realized debt can give an opportunity: if you can take out a loan and triple your money over the life of the loan, that's a win.

My mindset made me a millionaire

When I embraced that mindset, things started changing rapidly for me. I started a credit repair company and continued to invest in real estate. By 2020, my company was doing very well, and I was a millionaire. Today I'm 42, and I'm a multimillionaire with a 780 credit score.

In addition to learning about credit and debt, I've seen that your mindset can make a huge difference in your outcomes. Some people in my life are constantly looking for a handout, and they're stuck in a mindset of believing they can't do things. I used to be that way, but I changed.

I became a millionaire in my mind before I ever became one at the bank, because I adopted a strong mindset. I became focused and driven.

I pay for my son's college and give him an allowance

The importance of mindset is what I want my son, who is 18, to take from my story. I can see he's learned that lesson. He used to have C's and D's on his report card, but since he moved in with me, he's a straight-A student. He's about to graduate, and I'm rewarding his hard work by paying for college.

Throughout high school I gave my son a generous allowance, with the expectation that he'd keep his grades up. I pay for everything he needs, but if he wants money to hang out with friends, he knows that's his responsibility. He's seen my financial transformation, and I've talked with him since he was 10 about the importance of credit. Today, I think he knows more about credit than most people, and he even helps with my business teaching others about building their credit.

Now, I have good enough credit to drive luxury cars

That day when I was rejected for a car loan, I laughed along with the salesman. But really, it was no laughing matter. Today, I have multiple luxury cars, which I love. The Lamborghini Gallardo is probably my favorite, though my Bentley is really comfortable.

I want people to know that no matter how dismal your financial situation feels, you can change it. Leveraging credit and debt is a hidden avenue for people who didn't grow up wealthy to build their financial security. You can access more and more, as long as you do it responsibly.

• Welcome to the 6th edition of "The Rainmakers," representing the top 20 investment bankers of 2024.
• These 20 bankers completed some of the year's biggest deals, based on data assembled by MergerLinks.
• This year's list marks the first time a woman, Anu Aiyengar of JPMorgan, took the top spot.

If you were to describe dealmaking in 2024, you might say it's the year Wall Street got its swagger back.

US companies announced over $1.43 trillion in deals last year, the highest amount since 2021, when a dealmaking frenzy resulted in a record $2.51 trillion in US M&A activity, according to deals tracker LSEG. The uptick — combined with signs of economic growth and a more relaxed approach to regulations under the Trump administration — has led some industry leaders to suggest that the M&A freeze that started in 2022 might finally be coming to an end.

"There's a lot of pent-up energy in capital markets, particularly around the financial-sponsor community, and that will be unleashed," David Solomon, CEO of Goldman Sachs, said at a financial-industry conference in February. "I am very confident we will get back to 10-year averages" in historical dealmaking contexts, said, adding: "This year could be one of those times."

Bankers have good reason to be hopeful: There were 96 megadeals, or deals over $5 billion, announced globally last year — the most since 2021, according to LSEG. Such deals are the lifeblood of the biggest investment banks as they can generate hundreds of billions in fees for firms. Last year's M&A activity generated advisory fees of about $33.4 billion, a 7% increase from roughly $31.3 billion the year before, LSEG said.

Some of the multibillion-dollar tie-ups facilitated by the battle-hardened M&A bankers on this year's list included the nearly $36 billion sale of food manufacturer Kellanova to the snack brand Mars and the $26 billion takeover of Endeavor Energy Resources by rival Diamondback Energy.

To find out which bankers helped their firms benefit from last year's boom, Business Insider partnered with MergerLinks, a UK-based data provider that reviews M&A performance, to present the sixth annual edition of "The Rainmakers," a list of the top-20 investment bankers ranked by overall transaction volume, in the US.

This is the first year a woman — Anu Aiyengar of JPMorgan — has snagged the No. 1 spot. It's also the first time more than one woman has made the ranking, which is based on volumes of deals announced in the US.

Aiyengar, JPMorgan's global head of mergers and acquisitions, was joined by Lily Mahdavi, who was recently promoted to cohead of M&A in the Americas at Morgan Stanley.

It's Aiyengar's fourth appearance. Other repeat names include Suhail Sikhtian, who leads Goldman's natural-resources practice; Blair Effron, a co-founder of the elite-boutique investment bank Centerview; and Stephan Feldgoise, Goldman Sachs' head of M&A.

More notable, perhaps, are the unusually high number of new faces — including Mahdavi and her fellow Morgan Stanley dealmaker, Steve Munger. Also new to the list are Centerview's Todd Davison, Jefferies' Conrad Gibbins, and Xavier Loriferne of JPMorgan Chase. In total, nearly 50% of the members on this year's list — nine names — are making their inaugural debut, MergerLinks said.

The 2024 list also marks the first time a Jefferies banker has made the top 20.

MergerLinks tracks publicly announced deals and calculates deal values on a net basis, including both equity and debt components. To make the individual league table, a banker must have been the lead advisor on either side of a transaction.

Deal sizes are sourced from MergerLinks and public press releases and include the target company's net debt. The transaction values are converted from British pounds to US dollars at the average 2024 exchange rate. As a result, some deal prices announced in dollars throughout the year may not match up.

Anu Aiyengar, JPMorgan Chase

Title: Global head of M&A

Number of deals: 14

Value of deals: $83.2 billion

Aiyengar became JPMorgan's solo head of mergers and acquisitions in 2023, but has been with the bank since 2002. She is routinely cited as one of the financial-services industry's most powerful and influential female leaders. She has appeared on the list three times in the past.

Her 2024 deals included:

• Advised Intel in its $11 billion joint venture with Apollo Global Management tied to semiconductor development.
• Advised the private-equity firm Bain Capital in its $4.5 billion acquisition of Envestnet, a tech company focused on wealth management.

• Advised Rio Tinto, a global mining organization, its $6.7 billion acquisition of the chemicals firm Arcadium Lithium.

  ---

  Stephan Feldgoise, Goldman Sachs

  

  Title: Global head of M&A

  Number of deals: 7

  Value of deals: $78.2 billion

  Feldgoise was named Goldman's global head of mergers and acquisitions following a management reshuffle of its investment-banking division in January. Feldgoise was previously cohead of M&A and has also led the investment bank's consumer and retail coverage group. He joined the firm in 1997 and became a partner in 2008.This is his second time on the list, with his first appearance being two years ago.

  His 2024 deals included:

• Advised Pactiv Evergreen, a food industry manufacturer, in its all-cash sale for $6.7 billion to the packaging firm Novolex.
• Advised Ito Kogyo in its $47 billion acquisition of Seven & I Holdings, a retail firm that operates convenience stores in Japan.

• Advised the data center firm AirTrunk in its roughly $15 billion sale to the private-equity firm Blackstone.

  ---

George Boutros, Qatalyst Partners

Title: CEO

Number of deals: 7

Value of deals: $76.2 billion

Boutros is the CEO of the tech-focused investment bank Qatalyst. Previously, he was a senior banker at Credit Suisse, where he served as chairman of both the global technology and healthcare groups. Qatalyst says he has completed more than 700 transactions of various types over the years. This is his fourth year in a row on the Rainmakers list.

His 2024 deals included:

• Advised R1 RCM, which provides billing and financial tech to healthcare providers, on its nearly $9 billion sale to investment firms TowerBrook and CD&R.
• Advised Ansys, a design and engineering software company, on its $35 billion sale to Synopsys.
• Advised Hewlett Packard Enterprise on its all-cash acquisition of IT networking provider Juniper Networks for $14 billion.

Steve Munger, Morgan Stanley

Title: Chairman of global M&A

Number of deals: 5

Value of deals: $74.2 billion

Munger has been a Morgan Stanley banker for nearly 40 years and chairman of its M&A group for two decades. This is Munger's first time on the Rainmakers list.

His 2024 deals included:

• Advised Discover on its $35.3 billion all-stock sale to rival credit card giant Capital One.
• Advised Truist Financial on the sale of 80% of its insurance subsidiary to an investor consortium for $12.4 billion.
• Advised Marathon Oil on its $22.5 billion sale to ConocoPhillips.

Xavier Loriferne, JPMorgan Chase

Title: Managing director, head of FIG M&A, co-head of media & communications M&A

Number of deals: 10

Value of deals: $70.9 billion

Loriferne joined JPMorgan in 2006. This marks Loriferne's first time on the Rainmakers list.

His 2024 deals included:

• Advised on the $12 billion sale of HPS Investment Partners to the asset manager BlackRock.
• Advised on the $13.4 billion merger of the real-estate investment trust Uniti with telecommunications and broadband firm Windstream.
• Advised Nippon Life in its $10.6 billion acquisition of the life-insurance firm Resolution Life.

Todd Davison, Centerview

Title: Partner

Number of deals: 4

Value of deals: $63.2 billion

Davison is a partner at Centerview and has been an investment banker for more than 25 years. This is his first time appearing on the list. He joined Centerview in 2013 to cohead its media practice and was previously cohead of North American media coverage at Morgan Stanley. Centerview says he's been involved in more than $300 billion worth of transactions throughout his career.

His 2024 deals included:

• Advised Verizon on the $20 billion acquisition of Frontier Communications, a rival provider of TV, internet, and phone services.
• Advised Charter Communications on its $17.9 billion acquisition of Liberty Broadband, a data and wireless provider.
• Advised the independent directors of Endeavor, the talent agency and entertainment company, on a take-private sale to Silver Lake, which valued Endeavor at $13 billion.
• Advised entertainment giant Paramount on its $8.4 billion deal to buy production company Skydance Media.

Lily Mahdavi, Morgan Stanley

Title: Cohead of M&A, Americas

Number of deals: 9

Value of deals: $59.6 billion

Mahdavi, who has spent the entirety of her career focused on mergers and acquisitions, joined Morgan Stanley in 2012; she was previously at Deutsche Bank and Citi. She was promoted to co-lead the M&A business in the Americas in early 2025. This is Mahdavi's first time on the Rainmakers list.

Her 2024 deals included:

• Advised Marathon Oil on its $22.5 billion sale to ConocoPhillips.
• Advised insurance brokerage AssuredPartners on its $13.5 billion sale to Arthur J. Gallagher.
• Advised Nippon Paint on its $4.4 billion acquisition of AOC, a chemicals supplier.

Timothy Ingrassia, Goldman Sachs

Title: Co-chairman of global mergers and acquisitions

Number of deals: 8

Value of deals: $59.2 billion

Ingrassia was previously head of Americas M&A at Goldman, a role he held since 2004. Previously, he ran the consumer retail group. He has appeared multiple times on the Rainmakers list, including last year and the year prior.

His 2024 deals included:

• Advised Kellanova, a snack food manufacturer, in its $35.9 billion sale to the snack producer Mars.
• Advised Oneok, an energy company, in its $2.6 billion acquisition of Medallion Midstream.
• Advised Oneok in its $4.3 billion acquisition of a majority stake in EnLink Midstream, an energy firm.

Chris Gallea, Goldman Sachs

Title: Vice chairman of investment banking

Number of deals: 7

Value of deals: $51.3 billion

This is Gallea's third time on the list. Gallea joined Goldman Sachs from JPMorgan in 2018 after spending nearly two decades there. He has distinguished himself as a leading banker in the industrials sector.

His 2024 deals included:

• Advised Carrier, a climate and energy solutions company, in the $3 billion of its commercial and residential fire business to the private-equity firm Lone Star.
• Advised Emerson, a technology and software firm, in its $3.5 billion sale of a joint venture, Copeland, to the private-equity firm Blackstone.
• Advised Emerson Electric company, a software and engineering tech firm, in its $7.2 billion purchase of a large minority stake of software company Aspen Technology.

Gary Posternack, Barclays

Title: Chairman of global M&A

Number of deals: 6

Value of deals: $49.8 billion

The long-time global M&A leader moved into a new role as chairman last year so he could spend more time advising Barclays' top clients. Posternack joined the firm in 2008 after it bought Lehman Brothers, his previous firm. He led its natural-resources practice and its M&A takeover defense business. He became head of M&A worldwide in 2014.

His 2024 deals included:

• Advised R1 RCM, which provides billing and financial tech to healthcare providers, on its nearly $9 billion sale to investment firms TowerBrook and CD&R.
• Advised Frontier Communications, a provider of TV, internet, and phone services, on its $20 billion sale to Verizon.
• Advised fuel pipeline and storage operator NuStar Energy on its $7.3 billion sale to gas station chain Sunoco.

Suhail Sikhtian, Goldman Sachs

Title: Global head of natural resources investment banking

Number of deals: 3

Value of deals: $45.9 billion

Sikhtian became Goldman's sole head of natural-resources investment banking in 2020. He's been with the firm since 1998, when he started in the energy and power group. He has also worked with European energy companies from London. He made his first appearance on the list last year.

His 2024 deals included:

• Advised Southwestern Energy on its $11.4 billion acquisition of Chesapeake Energy, the Oklahoma City-based natural gas producer.
• Advised the energy company Endeavor in its $26 billion sale to Diamondback Energy.
• Advised Schlumberger, an energy tech firm, in its $8 billion acquisition of ChampionX, a maker of pumping equipment.

Chris Ventresca, JPMorgan Chase

Title: Global chairman of investment banking and mergers and acquisitions

Number of deals: 14

Value of deals: $45.1 billion

Ventresca, a three-decade veteran of JPMorgan, has advised on mandates spanning industrials, telecoms, consumer retail, and more. He appeared on the Rainmakers list for the first time last year.

His 2024 deals included:

• Advised IBM in its $6.4 billion acquisition of software firm HashiCorp.
• Advised energy firm ALLETE in its $6.2 billion sale to the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and Global Infrastructure Partners.
• Advised Vizio, a consumer electronics firm, in its $2.3 billion sale to Walmart, the US retailer.

Conrad Gibbins, Jefferies Financial Group

Title: Managing director

Number of deals: 10

Value of deals: $44.5 billion

This year marks Gibbins' first appearance on the list. The banker, who's based in Texas and concentrates on the energy sector, joined Jefferies as an analyst nearly 15 years ago. Since late 2022, he's served as Jefferies' co-head of Upstream in the Americas, and a managing director.

His 2024 deals included:

• Advised Diamondback Energy, an oil and gas company based in Texas, in its $26 billion acquisition of Endeavor, an energy firm.
• Advised Grayson Mill Energy, a Texas-based energy production firm, in its $5 billion sale to Devon Energy Corporation.
• Advised Franklin Mountain Energy, a Colorado-based oil and gas firm, in its $3.95 billion sale to Coterra Energy.

Drago Rajkovic, JPMorgan Chase

Title: Global chairman, mergers and acquisitions

Number of deals: 5

Value of deals: $43.6 billion

Rajkovic joined JPMorgan from Barclays in 2011 as head of technology mergers and acquisitions and has since risen to serve as a global chairman of M&A at the firm, led by CEO Jamie Dimon (shown above). At Barclays, he led tech M&A as well. It's his first time on the list.

His 2024 deals included:

• Juniper Networks/Hewlett Packard Enterprises
• Advised Squarespace, a custom website-development platform for businesses and entrepreneurs, in its $7.2 billion sale to the private-equity firm Permira.
• Intel Apollo Joint Venture/Intel Corporation

Naveen Nataraj, Evercore

Title: Senior managing director and cohead of US investment banking

Number of deals: 5

Value of deals: $40.8 billion

Nataraj, who has been at Evercore since 2002, is a member of the firm's management committee and a top banker in its technology, media, and telecommunications business. He has advised on more than $600 billion worth of transactions, the company says. His first appearance on the list was in 2022.

His 2024 deals included:

• Advised Synopsys on its $35 billion acquisition of Ansys, a design and engineering software company.
• Advised private-equity firm Veritas Capital on its acquisition of NCR Voyix's digital banking business for $2.6 billion.
• Advised Gen Digital, a security software company, on its $1 billion acquisition of MoneyLion, a digital banking fintech company.

Dan Ward, Evercore

Title: Senior managing director

Number of deals: 4

Value of deals: $40.1 billion

Ward has advised on more than $450 billion worth of M&A transactions, Evercore says, and is one of the industry's top energy bankers — this is his second year in a row on the Rainmakers list. Before joining Evercore, Ward led the global natural resources investment-banking business at Deutsche Bank.

His 2024 deals included:

• Advised Chesapeake Energy, the Oklahoma City-based natural gas producer, on its sale to Southwestern Energy for $11.4 billion.
• Advised Enerplus, an oil and gas producer, on its roughly $4 billion merger with Chord Energy.
• Advised ConocoPhillips on its $22.5 billion acquisition of Marathon Oil.

Riccardo Benedetti, Perella Weinberg Partners

Title: Partner

Number of deals: 2

Value of deals: $38.2 billion

Benedetti has been a senior banker with PWP since 2009, joining from Morgan Stanley, where he started his career in 1991. It's his first time on the list.

His 2024 deals included:

• Advised Holcim, a Swiss building materials manufacturer, on the $30 billion spinoff of its North American operations.
• Advised German conglomerate Bosch on its $8.1 billion acquisition of the HVAC business unit owned by Johnson Controls and Hitachi.

Adam Taetle, Lazard

Title: Managing director and global head of consumer, retail, and leisure

Number of deals: 2

Value of deals: $37 billion

Taetle is a first-timer on the Rainmakers list, but he's a veteran dealmaker with consumer and retail firms like Campbell's and Keurig Dr Pepper. He started his career with Goldman Sachs in the 1990s and has since held senior leadership roles at Barclays and Evercore, which he joined in 2018 to co-lead its consumer retail group. He left Evercore earlier this year, taking a top role with Lazard in June.

His 2024 deals included:

• Advised Kellanova, the Pringles and Pop-Tarts snack company formerly known as Kellogg's, on its $35.9 billion sale to Mars
• Advised Siete Foods, which makes tortillas, chips, and salsas, on its $1.2 billion sale to PepsiCo.

Michael J. Freudenstein, PJT Partners

Title: Partner

Number of deals: 2

Value of deals: $35.8 billion

This year marks Freudenstein's first time on the list. He joined PJT in 2017, having previously worked at JPMorgan in various roles. Those positions ranged from deputy head of Americas equity research to JPMorgan's head of market structure and asset management, and an investment banker focused on deals in the financial-services sector, before he left for PJT. The firm was founded by former top Morgan Stanley executive Paul Taubman, shown above.

His 2024 deals included:

• Advised Discover, the financial-services firm, in its $35 billion sale to Capital One.
• Advised Victory Capital, an investment manager, in its acquisition of Amundi, a firm offering a variety of financial-services products. Terms were undisclosed.

Blair Effron, Centerview Partners

Title: Co-founder and partner

Number of deals: 5

Value of deals: $34.6 billion

Effron cofounded Centerview in 2006 and built it into an influential name in investment banking, with more than 350 employees in the US and UK. Previously he was a top investment banker at UBS and has advised companies across healthcare, media, consumer and retail, and more. He also appeared on the Rainmakers list in 2019 and 2024.

His 2024 deals included:

• Advised the independent directors of Endeavor, the talent agency and entertainment company, on a take-private sale to Silver Lake, which valued Endeavor at $13 billion.
• Advised production company Skydance Media on its $8.4 billion sale to entertainment giant Paramount.

• Advised Emerson, a technology and engineering conglomerate, on a $7.2 billion deal to acquire the remainder of Aspen Technology, a provider of software for manufacturers that Emerson bought a majority stake of in 2022.

  To see more dealmaker rankings, visit the MergerLinks website. For more on its methodology and criteria, click here.

Reed Alexander is a correspondent at Business Insider and can be reached at [email protected]. Alex Morrell is a senior correspondent and can be reached at [email protected].

• Body recomposition is the process of losing fat while gaining muscle at the same time.
• After a body composition analysis, I worked with a trainer to find exercises to reach my goals.
• I should focus on adding weight and doing shorter, more challenging cardio.

To ring in the new year, I booked a body composition analysis at the athletic club Life Time.

After I got a scan of my muscle mass and body fat, a personal trainer walked me through the results: for optimal health, I needed to lose body fat and gain more muscle.

My main takeaway is that changing my diet is key. I'll get the best results if I maintain a calorie deficit, prioritize whole foods and lots of protein, and drink more water.

The trainer also said that I could update my current workout routine (a mix of cardio and strength training) to be more challenging. He walked me through a personal training session and showed me the exercises I needed to recompose my body.

Focus on strength training

Strength training is the best way to build muscle and burn fat. Because my body composition analysis showed that my legs are generally stronger than my arms, I asked if we could focus more on upper-body exercises.

To strengthen my upper body, I learned how to use machines for pull-ups, rows, and rope pulls.

I also worked on improving my chest press form. My trainer had me hold the barbell in position before I started doing reps so that I could make sure the correct muscles were activated. Otherwise, I won't see much progress and could hurt myself.

His main takeaway was that I should keep track of how much I lift and make sure I'm increasing weight.

He recommended starting with a lighter weight (and higher rep count), slowly increasing my weight, and decreasing my reps as needed per exercise.

That way, I can ensure that I'm progressively overloading and building up muscles rather than plateauing. In addition to the classes I take, I plan to work on upper- and lower-body workouts on my own as well.

Improving my core strength

Pretty much every weightlifting exercise I do involves "activating my core" so that I can stay balanced and secure throughout. My trainer said I should also include core exercises to help support my strength training goals: whether I'm doing a deadlift or a chest press, a strong core is necessary to do them right. Otherwise, I won't see many gains.

One I learned was lying on a box with my head and legs elevated while my back was flat. Holding positions like this for 30 seconds or a minute will gradually increase my core strength.

Try shorter cardio sessions

While I regularly run throughout the week, my trainer said that if I'm not challenging myself and keeping my heart rate up, I'm not actually burning much fat.

Rather than focusing on longer-distance runs where I go at a leisurely pace, he recommended doing shorter, 30-minute cardio sessions at the fastest pace I can tolerate.

Bulking and cutting at the same time is notoriously hard. There's a reason athletes typically focus on either gaining muscle or losing fat at one time. While I'm more focused on cutting, I'm hoping an emphasis on strength training and quicker cardio can help me hit my goals.

• Investment banks are hiring for 2026 summer interns, including Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan.
• First-round interviews are underway in some cases, Business Insider has learned.
• Here's how to ace the HireVue screening process and score a competitive Wall Street internship.

The annual race for summer investment-banking internships is kicking off across Wall Street.

Applications for 2026 summer jobs opened earlier this month at Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, RBC, Lazard, and Evercore, according to their website career portals. And some banks have already started sending applicants invitations to complete first-round interviews via HireVue, Business Insider has learned.

"It's a little bit like drinking water from a fire hose," said Meridith Dennes, an investment banking recruiter, of the Wall Street internship process. "There's so much stuff — it's really confusing, and it's changing all the time."

HireVue is a job screening tool many banks use to determine which candidates will get invitations for in-person interviews. Dennes said she is coaching some students who recently received invitations to do HireVue interviews, and Wall Street blogs are filling up with posts by aspiring interns seeking insight into the questions they could be asked. Banks that have been known to use the platform include Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, and Wells Fargo.

Landing a summer internship at a leading investment bank is often the starting point for a high-paying and prestigious career on Wall Street, including for those who move on from investment banking to private-equity dealmaking or hedge-fund trading. The process is super competitive. Indeed, Goldman received so many applicants for the 2024 class that its hire rate dropped to under 1% last year.

To score a spot, you must compete with hundreds of thousands of applicants and nail every stage of the process, including the HireVue interview. Goldman Sachs' head of talent acquisition told BI in a 2023 interview that thjope bank uses HireVue to decide who should attend their "Super Day" — an industry-wide phenomenon for interviewing many job candidates in a single setting.

To help applicants ace this screening, BI has compiled tips from industry insiders, including Dennes, Jaylyn Jones, a former campus recruiter for JPMorgan who now works for Duolingo, and Nathan Mondragon of HireVue. They explain how to channel your favorite influencers as a hack for on-camera appeal, how to navigate some of the software's tools, and what questions you can expect to be asked.

How it works

HireVue is a software that conducts and records one-way interviews. The platform will ask you a question, give you a set amount of time to prepare your answer, and then start recording your response. For banks, the interviews will generally consist of four to seven questions, said Dennes.

After you've been asked a question, you will have 20 to 30 seconds to think about and prepare your answer, explained Jones, who helps the language-learning app DuoLingo find students for software engineering and product management roles. HireVue will give you one to three minutes to answer, depending on the question, she added.

"While they can be a little nerve-wracking, on-demand video interviews are a great way to shorten the hiring process and increase fairness so you can start your first day as soon as possible," Mondragon, HireVue's Chief Innovation Officer and IO Psychologist, told BI via email.

Use practice mode

Most HireVue invitations include a practice feature. Use it to familiarize yourself with all the tools and buttons before your interview begins.

"Utilize the practice questions and other preparation tools offered within the interview platform," added Mondragon. "Only you can see your practice recordings, so use them fully."

HireVue's candidate help center explains it like this: "You can access practice questions by clicking the link from your invitation email and following the prompts until presented with the option to 'Try a Practice Question'. This should not start your interview."

You should also practice answering timed questions while recording yourself well before logging into HireVue, Dennes said.

"The best way to prepare for a HireVue is to take a list of standard questions from your school career center or online and then bullet out your answers," she said. "Then run a mock interview process where you use your phone or a stopwatch and you give yourself 30 to 60 seconds to prepare and 90 seconds to answer."

Practicing with a timer is key.

"You will be surprised at how fast 90 seconds go by if you don't know what you're saying," Dennes said, adding: "You'll be cut off and you won't be able to get to the point."

Move fast and be professional

Dennes suggested that candidates aim to submit their interviews within 48 hours of getting the invitation, even if they have a much longer deadline to turn it in. Think of it this way: Banks want to hire people who really want to work for them.

"If you're one of the first people to submit and you're a strong candidate, it shows you have a commitment to this firm," said Dennes.

Dress professionally and make sure you are seated in a professional setting, Jones and Dennes agreed.

"I recently spoke to a client who told me that a kid showed up in a green flannel shirt. No!" Dennes said. She suggested candidates put on a tie, a dress, or a nice sweater. "I don't know why it's not obvious, but it isn't," she added.

Interviewing at home is OK if you can't find a space that's more professional, but make sure it's presentable, said Jones.

"Filming in your dorm room is totally normal," she said. "But we don't want to see alcohol bottles in the back of your videos, especially if you're presumably not of legal drinking age."

If you have a messy bedroom, blur the background. And sit in a real chair, she said.

"I've seen students do HireVues physically in the bed, like, laying down," added Jones. "I've heard some students say 'Oh I thought it was AI so if I just said enough buzzwords no one was going to watch it.'"

Channel your inner influencer

Even if you aren't the type of person to post a reel or TikTok, pretend you are for a few minutes, Jones said. Channel your favorite influencers or pretend you're FaceTiming a friend or family member. There's a way to speak professionally without coming off as mechanical or boring. That's the energy you should aim for, she said — relaxed, relatable, and energetic.

"There's something about just being able to speak naturally," she said. "Yes, I'm talking to a camera and recording it, but it does not have to be this weird robotic, cue-card vibe."

An easy way to keep up your energy is to remember to smile when speaking and raise the pitch of your voice slightly. Tap into the "Hi guys, welcome back to my channel!" energy of YouTube creators, said Jones — without sounding disingenuous or hokey.

Use bulleted notes versus scripted answers

Use preparation time and the time in between takes to jot down your key talking points rather than trying to write out exact lines to read, the experts said.

"What we want to avoid is the candidates reading word for word a script out loud of the answer," said Jones. "I don't think they realize that we can see their eyes tracking across the screen."

Dennes, the Wall Street headhunter, suggested writing down the questions as they're being asked to make sure you are truly responding to them. Then use those bullet points from the earlier preparation for your answers.

"It's akin to a debate format where you would be asked a question, write it down, and then present your answer."

Take advantage of the redo tool

Many companies give applicants the opportunity to re-record every question at least once, said Jones. Figure out if you have redos before starting and, if so, how many. Then take advantage of it.

A little-utilized trick: There's no time limit between your first take and your redo, so if you don't like your first take, you could spend as long as you want to sit there and think through your answer before recording the second take.

Once you run out of redos, however, the software will submit the last take as your recorded response.

"You can't take it back, you can't undo it, so you really wanna make sure if you're gonna do a redo that you've kind of thought through what you're going to do with that redo," said Jones.

A common mistake, she said, is accidentally hitting "submit" instead of "redo" or "record."

"I had a candidate who accidentally recorded himself Facetiming his friend for help with the answers because he thought he was in between takes."

Research sample questions

Some questions, according to Dennes, may include:

• Give an example of an experience where you've worked within a team.
• Tell us about a time you handled a contentious situation. What was your approach?
• Why [insert bank name here]?
• Tell us about an article you read recently that you were interested in and why?
• What is your greatest weakness?

The "greatest weakness" question is a common fumble, she added.

"You cannot say, 'I am a perfectionist.' Come up with an actual weakness, but one that's fixable or redeemable," she said.

She also stressed the importance of being prepared to answer "Why [insert bank name here]." This is where pre-application networking and coffee chats can really help. It can be advantageous to briefly mention some of the people at the bank you've met or spoken to and what you've gathered in your networking about what makes the firm special and why it aligns with you as a person.

As Lazard's head of recruiting, Danielle Dodgen, told BI in a 2023 interview, this question can often make or break a candidate's chance at moving on to the next round.

"It sounds so simple, but it's really important to be able to convey to the interviewer, 'This is my story, this is how I got here, and this is why I'm pursuing this path,'" said Dodgen. "There are instances where, if candidates haven't put much thought into the 'why,' it's pretty clear to interviewers."

Jones also stressed the importance of relating your experiences and achievements back to investment banking.

"Good candidates are able to give a concise, STAR-method answer that really lays out what they've done, what their actions were, what's the result," she said. "But great candidates then tie it back to the role."

• JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs had blockbuster performance numbers for the end of 2024.
• JPMorgan's profit rose 50%; Goldman's profit jumped 105%, led by higher investment-banking fees.
• Here's what it could mean for hiring across Wall Street in 2025.

Big banks posted blowout fourth-quarter earnings on Wednesday, led by a growing appetite for corporate financing, institutional trading, and dealmaking —  trends that could boost hiring in 2025.

JPMorgan Chase kicked off Wall Street's earnings season by reporting a 50% increase in profits, led by a 49% increase in investment-banking revenue over last year's fourth quarter, and double-digit growth in trading revenue. Goldman Sachs, meanwhile, said profit for the three months that ended on December 31 rose 105%, driven by demand for corporate dealmaking and capital raising. And Citigroup showed a 35% increase in investment-banking revenue for the fourth quarter from a year ago.

The robust results follow several years of sagging demand for Wall Street's bread-and-butter businesses, layoffs, lower bonuses, and an overall muted environment for job hopping.

Now, the strong 2024 performances, particularly in trading, mean that annual bonuses could be as much as 35% higher from a year ago. Banks have started to share the bonus numbers with employees, as Business Insider reported last week.

More broadly, Wall Street headhunters say that hiring has been picking up in select areas in recent months, including junior-banking roles and back-office tech jobs. They expect the shift to continue in 2025.

"The 45% surge in Goldman's profits and CEO David Solomon's bullish outlook on M&A signals a notable shift in the hiring market," said Meridith Dennes, managing partner at Prospect Rock Partners recruiting firm. "Banks that aggressively downsized during the 2022 to 2023 slowdown are now selectively rebuilding their deal teams."

Of course, working on Wall Street could also get harder in 2025. The industry's notoriously long hours could intensify as demand for dealmaking and capital raising continues. At the same time, work-from-home options are shrinking, with JPMorgan last week telling employees on a hybrid schedule to return to the office five days a week starting in March.

Here are 4 trends in financial-industry hiring that could spur Wall Street job growth in 2025:

Dealmakers

Following several years of muted dealmaking, demand for mergers and acquisitions has been picking up in recent months, driven by lower borrowing costs as interest rates decline. The M&A streak is expected to continue in 2025, aided by a more business-friendly regulatory regime under President-elect Donald Trump.

The uptick is already having an effect on hiring. As BI recently reported, John Weinberg, the chairman and CEO of the elite boutique investment bank Evercore, said in December that he's been spending an unusual amount of time on year-end hiring.

"Most of the time, you don't really do much recruiting in November or December," he said at a Goldman Sachs conference in New York. "If you could see my schedule, you'd see that virtually every day I am speaking with and recruiting" new talent, he said.

As for the jobs outlook, he said: "You could probably anticipate that our recruiting efforts will increase, not decrease."

Recruiters in December told BI that they have seen surging demand for M&A bankers in industries viewed as hot for deals, including tech, healthcare, restructuring, industrials, consumer retail, and financial institutions — a trend they expect to continue this year.

Junior bankers

Demand for junior investment-banking talent has also been picking up. Dennes, the headhunter, said that she is seeing especially strong demand for what she referred to as "the seasoned associate," but also at the vice-president level, who tend to sit in the middle of the investment-banking pecking order.

As BI reported in October, JPMorgan Chase ramped up off-cycle hiring for junior investment bankers late last year, according to people familiar with the bank's recruitment efforts and to its online jobs board. At the time of the report, a JPMorgan executive told BI that the bank was hiring across all levels of investment banking amid a bump in deal flow.

Whether the JPMorgan hiring boost will continue in 2025, however, remains to be seen. On Wednesday, the bank's chief financial officer, Jeremy Barnum, told investors that JPMorgan intends to keep headcount flat this year, following a 2% rise in staffing in 2024. That included a 3% rise in its asset- and wealth-management unit, according to company filings.

Goldman Sachs' careers portal, meanwhile, displays 15 open job listings for junior bankers in New York, London, and San Francisco, namely at the analyst and associate levels. In January, one open role called for an associate to cover deals for financial institutions and asset-management clients, while another sought an IB associate to focus on the entertainment sector. A third associate position was focused on executing general mergers and acquisitions.

IT jobs

Headhunters have said that an array of financial-services firms, from banks to hedge funds, are expected to boost tech hiring as they explore and build new artificial intelligence capabilities.

In July, JPMorgan's CEO, Jamie Dimon, said he expects to add thousands of AI-related jobs in the next few years. Hedge funds and proprietary-trading firms have also been getting into the act, shelling out big bucks, as much as $350,000 in annual salaries, to snag coveted AI researchers and engineers.

Some private-equity firms, meanwhile, have been paying up to $2 million, including base salary and bonus, for so-called AI operating executives, recruiters told BI last year.

See BI's top tips for landing a Wall Street tech job in 2025.

Private credit and financing

So-called private credit has been on a roll in recent years as more asset managers, like Apollo and Blackstone, pick up lending that banks increasingly deem too risky for their balance sheets.

Plus, there are signs that demand for nonbank loans will only intensify in 2025, as demand for corporate capital raising increases, including for M&A.

On Monday, Goldman Sachs announced a new structure to capitalize on growing demand for financing. Its new Capital Solutions Group is geared to provide alternative sources of lending to corporate clients as well as financial sponsors.

Earlier this month, Bloomberg reported that hedge fund Point72 hired Todd Hirsch, a former Blackstone senior managing director, to build out its new private-credit business.

Goldman on Wednesday reported record results in fixed-income and equities financing, which includes capital raising on behalf of clients. Goldman's CEO referred to financing a "large strategic opportunity" for the bank, thanks to what he described as "important structural trends currently taking place in finance" including the emergence of private credit.

See BI's top do's and don'ts for landing a job in the burgeoning private-credit industry.

Regardless of what kind of exercise you’re into, if you’re working out, you’ll want a pair of wireless workout headphones. They allow you to be free and untethered during a serious weight-lifting session, a 5K run, an hour at the skate park and everywhere in between where you’re moving and sweating a ton. There are dozens of great wireless headphones and wireless earbud options out there, but for exercise in particular, there are additional factors to consider before picking one up like water resistance, battery life and overall comfort.

At Engadget, we’ve tested a bunch of fitness-ready headphones and earbuds to come up with our top picks, plus some advice to consider before you pick up a pair. All of our top picks below will work in and out of the gym, so you can invest in just one pair and make those your daily driver. If you’re primarily a runner, check out our list of best headphones for running.

What to look for in workout headphones

Design

Before diving in, it’s worth mentioning that this guide focuses on wireless earbuds. While you could wear over-ear or on-ear headphones during a workout, most of the best headphones available now do not have the same level of durability. Water and dust resistance, particularly the former, is important for any audio gear you plan on sweating with or taking outdoors, and that’s more prevalent in the wireless earbuds world.

Most earbuds have one of three designs: in-ear, in-ear with hook or open-ear. The first two are the most popular. In-ears are arguably the most common, while those with hooks promise better security and fit since they have an appendage that curls around the top of your ear. Open-ear designs don’t stick into your ear canal, but rather sit just outside of it. This makes it easier to hear the world around you while also listening to audio, and could be more comfortable for those who don’t like the intrusiveness of in-ear buds.

Water resistance and dust protection

Even if a pair of headphones for working out aren’t marketed specifically as exercise headphones, a sturdy, water-resistant design will, by default, make them suitable for exercise. To avoid repetition, here’s a quick primer on durability, or ingression protection (IP) ratings. The first digit you’ll see after the “IP” refers to protection from dust and other potential intrusions, measured on a scale from 1 to 6. The second refers to water resistance or even waterproofing, in the best cases. The ratings for water resistance are ranked on a scale of 1 to 9; higher numbers mean more protection, while the letter “X” means the device is not rated for protection in that regard.

All of the earbuds we tested for this guide have at least an IPX4 rating, which means there’s no dust protection, but the buds can withstand splashes from any direction and are sweat resistant, but probably shouldn't be submerged. For a detailed breakdown of all the possible permutations, check out this guide published by a supplier called The Enclosure Company.

Active noise cancellation and transparency mode

Active noise cancellation (ANC) is becoming standard on wireless earbuds, at least those above a certain price point. If you’re looking for a pair of buds that can be your workout companion and serve you outside of the gym, too, noise cancelation is a good feature to have. It makes the buds more versatile, allowing you to block out the dull roar of your home or office so you can focus, or give you some solitude during a busy commute.

But an earbud’s ability to block out the world goes hand-in-hand with its ability to open things back up should you need it. Many ANC earbuds also support some sort of “transparency mode,” or various levels of noise reduction. This is important for running headphones because exercising outdoors, alongside busy streets, can be dangerous. You probably don’t want to be totally oblivious to what’s going on around you when you’re running outside; adjusting noise cancelation levels to increase your awareness will help with that. Stronger noise cancelation might be more appealing to those doing more indoor training if they want to block out the dull roar of a gym or the guy exaggeratingly lifting weights next to you.

Battery life

All of the Bluetooth earbuds we tested have a battery life of six to eight hours. In general, that’s what you can expect from this space, with a few outliers that can get up to 15 hours of life on a charge. Even the low end of the spectrum should be good enough for most athletes and gym junkies, but it’ll be handy to keep the buds’ charging case on you if you think you’ll get close to using up all their juice during a single session.

You’ll get an average of 20 to 28 extra hours of battery out of most charging cases and all of the earbuds we tested had holders that provided at least an extra 15 hours. This will dictate how often you actually have to charge the device — as in physically connect the case with earbuds inside to a charging cable, or set it on a wireless charger to power up.

How we test workout headphones

In testing wireless workout headphones, I wear them during every bit of exercise I do — be it a casual walk around the block, a brisk morning run or a challenging weight-lifting session. I’m looking for comfort arguably most of all, because you should never be fussing with your earbuds when you should be focusing on working out. In the same vein, I’m cognizant of if they get loose during fast movements or slippery when I’m sweating. I also use the earbuds when not exercising to take calls and listen to music throughout the day. Many people will want just one pair of earbuds that they can use while exercising and just doing everyday things, so I evaluate each pair on their ability to be comfortable and provide a good listening experience in multiple different activities.

While I am also evaluating sound quality, I’m admittedly not an audio expert. My colleague Billy Steele holds that title at Engadget, and you’ll find much more detailed information about audio quality for some of our top picks in his reviews and buying guides. With these headphones for working out, however, I will make note of related issues if they stood out (i.e. if a pair of earbuds had noticeably strong bass out of the box, weak highs, etc). Most of the wireless workout headphones we tested work with companion apps that have adjustable EQ settings, so you’ll be able to tweak sound profiles to your liking in most cases.

A note about Jabra headphones

Jabra announced it will exit the consumer earbuds business, which is disappointing considering the company has made excellent headphones for working out. Our top picks include two Jabra models and we feel comfortable recommending them still because Jabra plans to support its current earbuds for "several years." However, we're constantly testing new buds and reassessing our top picks, so we'll update this list accordingly in the future.

Best workout headphones for 2025

Others wireless workout headphones we tested

Apple AirPods Pro

The Apple AirPods Pro have an IP54 rating, which protects them from brief encounters with dust and splashes. While that’s more dust protection than many other earbuds we tested, it’s the same level of water resistance that most exercise-specific competitors have. We generally like the AirPods Pro, but the Beats Fit Pro offer many of the same features and conveniences (namely good transparency mode and the H1 chip), with a design that’s more appropriate for working out.

Beats Powerbeats Pro

The Powerbeats Pro are a good alternative to the Beats Fit Pro if you’re a stickler for a hook design. However, they cost $50 more than the Fit Pro (although they often hover around $180) and don’t offer any significant upgrades or additional features aside from their design. They’re also quite old at this point (launched in 2019) and it appears Beats is putting more effort into upgrading and updating its newer models rather than this model.

Anker Soundcore AeroFit Pro

The Soundcore AeroFit Pro is Anker’s version of the Shokz OpenFit, but I found it to be less secure and not as comfortable as the latter. The actual earbuds on the AeroFit Pro are noticeably bulkier than those on the OpenFit, which caused them to shift and move much more when I was wearing them during exercise. They never fell off my ears completely, but I spent more time adjusting them than I did enjoying them.

JBL Endurance Peak 3

The most noteworthy thing about the Endurance Peak 3 is that they have the same IP68-rating that the Jabra Elite 8 Active do, but they only cost $100. But, while you get the same protection here, you’ll have to sacrifice in other areas. The Endurance Peak 3 didn’t blow me away when it came to sound quality or comfort (the hook is more rigid than those on my favorite buds of a similar style) and their charging case is massive compared to most competitors.

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