Wall Street’s newest stars are not investment bankers, hedge fund managers or traders.
They are AI gurus charging nearly Rs 24 lakh for a single training session, and some of the world’s biggest banks are lining up to hire them.
Two former SoftBank investors, Felipe Sinisterra and Dave Wang, are making massive money teaching bankers, fund managers and analysts how to use artificial intelligence tools such as ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini to work faster, analyse companies better and survive the growing AI shift inside finance, reported Bloomberg.
Their company, Wall Street Prompt, charges $25,000, which comes to nearly Rs 24 lah, for a one-day workshop and is reportedly backlogged for two months because demand is so high.
The surge in demand highlights how rapidly artificial intelligence is changing the banking and finance industry globally.
The story is no longer just about using AI to save time.
Banks are increasingly seeing AI as a tool that could reshape jobs, reduce teams and improve productivity sharply.
That fear is driving banks to spend heavily on AI training.
“What is happening now is that people are seeing AI as a source of edge, a source of offense,” Sinisterra told Bloomberg.
“What we’ll see in the future is that people will see it as a necessity,” he added.
According to the report, major global banks are already cutting jobs while simultaneously investing aggressively in AI systems and training.
Standard Chartered is reportedly preparing to cut thousands of support roles over the next four years.
Meanwhile, Citigroup, Wells Fargo and Bank of America together cut more than 5,000 jobs in the first quarter of 2026 despite reporting record earnings.
At the same time, banks are embedding AI deeply into daily work.
JPMorgan Chase has already rolled out its internal AI platform called LLM Suite to most employees, while Goldman Sachs is working with AI startup Anthropic to develop AI agents.
Bank of America says its developers became 20-25% more productive after using AI tools.
The workshops are not traditional coding classes.
Instead, they focus on teaching finance professionals how to use AI to automate some of the most time-consuming parts of their work.
Bloomberg reported that during one training session in New York, Wang demonstrated how Google’s Gemini AI model could analyse startup founders’ pitch videos and even compare speech transcripts with facial expressions and body language to identify possible red flags.
Sinisterra showed how analysts could use OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude to scan earnings-call transcripts, run sentiment analysis and turn management commentary into spreadsheet-based financial forecasts.
Tasks that earlier took analysts several hours can now reportedly be done in minutes.
“It used to take me hours to analyze a company. Now I plug in a prompt, and in 90 seconds, I get the key points,” Justin Tang, a buy-side analyst at Singapore-based hedge fund Regal Funds Management, told Bloomberg.
One of the biggest shifts highlighted in the report is that AI fluency is increasingly becoming a requirement rather than an optional skill in finance.
Banks are now worried that employees who cannot effectively use AI tools may fall behind.
“The biggest challenge inside a large bank isn’t the technology, it’s the people,” Jake Bridge, APAC Managing Director at tech recruitment firm Evolution, told Bloomberg.
According to the report, the gap between traditional workers and “AI super adopters” is widening rapidly inside financial firms.
The pressure is especially intense for junior analysts and associates because AI tools are increasingly capable of handling repetitive research, summarisation and data-processing work.
Igor Sydorenko, CEO of AI consultancy Neurons Lab, told Bloomberg that highly skilled professionals using AI may eventually replace larger junior teams.
“Highly skilled people, with AI tools, will be able to do 10, 20 times more, much better, much faster,” he said.
“They will not need any junior financial analysts, any associates. They will just do it by themselves.”
The two founders behind Wall Street Prompt both come from finance and technology backgrounds.
Dave Wang previously worked at Morgan Stanley and later joined SoftBank’s Latin America Fund, where he focused on crypto investing.
Felipe Sinisterra earlier worked as a software engineer at Meta Platforms before moving into finance roles at Goldman Sachs and Bank of America and later joining SoftBank.
According to Bloomberg, the duo originally planned to build a data business but realised that finance professionals were more interested in learning how to use AI tools effectively.
“People kept telling us we have the tools, we just don’t know how to use them the way you do,” Sinisterra told Bloomberg.
“They wanted to learn, not buy more software.”
The report highlights how artificial intelligence is now creating a new competition inside global finance.
Earlier, bankers competed on financial modelling skills, market knowledge and deal-making abilities.
Now, AI productivity is becoming another key differentiator.
Professionals who know how to use AI effectively can reportedly analyse companies faster, automate research and process information at much greater speed.
That is changing hiring, productivity and even career survival strategies inside financial firms.
And banks appear willing to spend heavily to avoid being left behind.
The rise of Rs 24 lakh AI workshops shows how quickly artificial intelligence is moving from experimentation to necessity inside global finance.
The biggest fear on Wall Street may no longer be missing a deal or a market rally.
It may be falling behind in the AI race.