Can AI (ChatGPT, Claude, etc.) Replace Junior Analysts?
I’ve been hearing a lot of talk lately that AI are ready to replace junior analysts, especially in research-heavy roles — so I decided to put that to the test.
I ran 6 of the top AI through a real financial research assignment：
- GPT-5
- Claude Sonnet 4.5
- Gemini 2.5 Pro
- Manus
- Pokee AI
- Skywork
The task:
Create a professional training guide for the U.S. EXIM Bank Single-Buyer Insurance Program (2021–2023) — a document that’s actually usable for training financial advisors and screening clients.
Results summary:
- Speed: Gemini 2.5 Pro was fastest (~7 min); others took 10–15 min.
- Quality: Claude Sonnet 4.5 and Skywork produced professional-grade results; GPT-5 underperformed.
- Instruction following: Claude understood the assignment best.
- Sources: Skywork had the most relevant, verifiable citations.
TL;DR:
Claude Sonnet 4.5 and Skywork delivered outputs close to what a human analyst might produce. The rest — including GPT-5 — still struggled with coherence, compliance, or practical structure.
At least for this open-ended, real-world research tasks, AI shows obvious limitation..
Attached below (images 2–7) are anonymized outputs from each agent.
Which one looks most professional to you?
Would you trust any of these as a junior analyst’s report?
Drop your thoughts below 👇
bro that’s not what junior bankers do lol
That's possible lol. I got this task from my friend who is working for a fund that mainly does loans. Maybe not a typical IB analyst task.
I think you are missing the general purpose and reason why an IB analyst is necessary. The reason why IMO Ai won't takeover analysts is that a huge part of the job is to develop the skill set to move up to associate/VP. While a hefty amount leave after 2 years, banks rely on those who've grinded it out in the junior levels to lead the next generation. Theoretically, even if AI could perfectly replicate a human at junior levels, that would be great for... 5 years but after the 5 year mark, where would you find Sr associates or Vps who actually know how to do shit. Unless you think the entire work chain will be replaced, analysts should in general be fine.
You have to realize, despite recruiting for these jobs being super tough, the actual day to day is a lot less tough (in terms of the mental strain of the work, obviously the hours are what is the killer). Aligning logos and spreading comps doesn't take a genius, as it shouldn't but it provides a learning ground for juniors to help out while also picking up the higher level skills they will need to progress while also understanding the life of what it feels at the bottom.
100% agree! This test was only designed to evaluate one specific aspect of an analyst’s role — the ability to conduct research and produce written reports. There are many other dimensions to being an analyst, especially as they progress toward associate or VP roles, that AI simply can’t replicate.
If it was supposed to always only consider replacing one teeny tiny aspect of an analyst’s workflow why would you beg the question if AI will be able to replace analysts?
If anything models failing on such a tiny, low-value part of a junior’s job substantiates a very strong bear case on AI used for these types of workflows
u
lol is this a sky work ad 🙈
Nah
Did you review the work to confirm it wasn’t all hallucinated nonsense? Being hyperbolic, obviously, but that’s a frequent issue I run into with more esoteric content.
That's true. Some of them are obvious nonsense (like there are empty tables, fake source URL), but I will say about 60% of the content looks solid to me.
What’s Pokémon Ai
Lol. We already got Poke AI and Pokee AI, maybe Pokemon AI one day in the future.
Look, it's not going to be 0 analysts. Nor will it be the 100% there are now. At the very least the rate of hiring will slow and long term the industry will have 50% of the analysts it used to or some equivalent. THe job will exist still and lower scale
Sounds reasonable to me
As a freshman at a target school who aspires to work on Wall Street, this already scares me. I know with time AI is only going to get more powerful. I feel it is a matter of when, not if, AI reduces the amount of entry level high finance jobs. I hope this is not the case but it seems like a sad reality. Maybe I switch to Pre-med lol. idk.
Lol it's good to explore other choices out there.
Can it? Yes? Will it be the general models you tested here? No.
People keep being obsessed with this doomer view of AI taking all of the jobs. In reality that will not happen. AI is a tool that allows humans to optimize their time to focus on higher value human optimized work.
Also, anyone who thinks that more jobs will not be the result of this are the same ones who were complaining about tractors taking over manual farm work. All of those people clearly didn't end up in some ditch somewhere after dying of stravation.
Agree! AI should be augmenting people, not replacing people. Also there will definitely be new job created.
It will most heavily impact all of the 'marginal' jobs and/or seats across the industry. You won't need the 10th-12th analysts who probably were going to be let go anyway, as AI will be able to take some of the work you'd send their way. Same with other areas of the financial services industry - it will cut at the margins, and give leverage to those who are able to utilize it effectively.
There's a huge amount of applications for AI that we've seen in our firm, and we are just getting started. The risk to most of these timelines are the legal, privacy, compliance, risk, and regulatory considerations of these. Especially for big banks or large institutional managers - they will be slower to adopt, as the 'risk' of saying "Whoops - my AI model didn't quite calculate my risk limits, and I mis hedged my balance sheet' or 'oh yeah, my AI reporting bot screwed up your performance calcs' - is a pretty big issue. Anecdotally, at the institutional level, everyone wants to see or hear that you are looking at it, testing it, starting to use it - but ultimately, they want the human sign off and/or touch to get it across the finish line.
Where you will see it most is smaller, privately held, more nimble firms who has less beau acracy to speed the development. Those are where you'll see the most interesting applications day to day, and then will filter out from there.
Yeah, I see many new AI companies focusing on compliance and legal right now. I think we’re still very early in the process, and we’ll have to see what happens next.
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