A few months ago a New York financier told me he had just experienced a “first”: his 2025 summer interns “were the first true AI natives I have seen”. This meant they had grown up not only among digital tech, but AI too.
So how did it go? He winced. While those wannabe masters of the universe initially seemed wildly impressive, when senior financiers later probed their ideas they found them alarmingly shallow.
Consequently this person’s company made fewer return offers and is now focusing less on graduates in science, technology, engineering and mathematics — and more humanities students instead.
“We want critical thinking, not just AI,” he explains. Human brainpower is needed to handle the silicon variant.
Now, this is just one tiny anecdote in a tsunami of emerging AI-linked stories and I daresay there are counter-examples. But it illustrates a bigger point: as AI fever sweeps finance, it is neither delivering the profit nirvana predicted by tech evangelists nor hastening the doom the Cassandras have warned about. Or at least not yet