AI Will Steal Your Finance Job—And That’s a Good Thing
Why the AI revolution could free Columbia from the tyranny of careerism
It’s a safe bet that many of you are planning to work in finance. Indeed, nearly 33 percent of recent graduates work in either the finance or consulting industries, making them among the most popular fields Columbia alumni enter. If you do not plan to work in finance, just wait until a bad grade on a calc midterm or a somber late-night Google search of “job opportunities for art majors” challenges your most deeply held career ambitions. Much like studying the Core Curriculum, experiencing career panic and frantically plotting a pivot to investment banking is a rite of passage for Columbia students: a modern inevitability amidst an increasingly competitive job market.
But before you drop your major, switch to economics, and devote the remainder of your undergraduate life to becoming the best investment banker you can be, I advise you to keep this in mind: AI is coming for your entry-level finance job.
New startups like Clockwork, Endex, and Daloopa are forming every day to tackle financial planning and analysis. They aim to use AI to automate away repetitive Excel tasks that entry-level analysts are expected to memorize and perform. Other startups like Rogo and beautiful.ai are tackling pitch deck creation. Their promise is to near-instantly generate professional-grade presentations that would take the average junior analyst several days to create.
No one knows for sure what impact AI will have on the job market in three years, but let’s be honest: if your “dream job” consists of tasks so repetitive that a large language model can master them, perhaps it’s time to dream a little bigger. If an algorithm can do it, maybe it wasn’t a worthy dream to begin with.
Columbia students’ obsession with a narrow set of highly lucrative career paths has spiraled out of control. Finance clubs are harder to get into than the University itself, and many students dedicate more energy to recruiting than to their classes. While the media focuses on Columbia’s protest culture, a quieter and more pervasive ideology has consumed campus: careerism.
The tenets of careerism are delightfully simple and can be enumerated as follows:
There are only two majors: Economics and Financial Economics. All other subjects are, at best, hobbies.
Columbia is nothing but a training camp for your future investment banking or consulting job.
Before making any life decision, ask yourself: What would my Goldman Sachs recruiter think?
The hundreds of students who live by these sacred principles are blinding themselves to a harsh reality. The very skills they’re grinding to perfect—building pitch decks, memorizing Excel commands—are precisely the tasks that will be outsourced to AI, and sooner than they think.
This begs the question: in an era of AI-induced chaos, how do you make yourself permanently employable?
The first step is recognizing that betting your future on a niche, industry-specific skill set is a losing strategy. There is simply too much uncertainty. Instead, the most valuable skills you can develop (including those useful for finance) all boil down to a small set of timeless abilities.
Instead of mastering the art of financial modeling, focus on becoming a razor-sharp problem solver. Instead of churning out practice pitch decks, learn to become a compelling writer and creative thinker. These foundational skills will allow you to pivot to whatever field looks promising down the road, without worrying about what that career might entail. Assuming LLMs don’t render humanity entirely useless, it’s a safe bet that critical thinking will always be in demand.
Unlike the singular, deterministic path that produces investment bankers (major in econ, join finance clubs, sacrifice your soul), there are dozens of ways to build these core skills. If you want to become a great problem solver, major in math or physics. If your biggest asset is creative thinking, study english or the arts.
Focusing on these broader skills won’t just make you more adaptable in an AI-dominated market; it will also make your life more fulfilling. For the first time in a long time, Columbia students don’t have to balance personal interests with career aspirations. In fact, pursuing those interests will do more for your employability than any Econ course or finance club ever could. As a user on Substack so eloquently put it: “job market so bad i started chasing my dreams.”
This interest-based approach is also more aligned with the spirit of the University. Columbia is supposed to be about pursuing knowledge for its own sake. The Core Curriculum is built on the idea that true education requires more than mastering one’s major. Like Dante’s character in the Inferno, somewhere down the line we’ve strayed from this path and forgotten what we are here to do.
So, do not fear the AI revolution. Use this as an opportunity to reflect on what you truly value. Join that niche club you saw at the activities fair. Major in Astrophysics, or Russian Literature, or whatever it is that once piqued your curiosity before career anxiety forced you to toss it aside.
Those anxieties won’t help you anyway. In the age of AI, the only losing move is to bet against yourself.
Mr. Hartstein is a sophomore at Columbia College studying physics. He is a senior editor for Sundial.
The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Sundial editorial board as a whole or any other members of the staff.
For those interested in submitting a response to this article, please contact us at columbia.sundial@gmail.com.
Outstanding