Most new hires spend day one hunting for the bathroom, guessing the Wi-Fi password, and nodding along to an org chart nobody actually understands. Goldman Sachs and Lloyds just onboarded a new class of employee that skipped all of that and went directly to executing trades.
These are what banks are calling "digital co-workers," and the technical term underneath the friendly nickname is agentic AI, meaning a system that can plan, take actions, and course-correct on its own instead of waiting for a human to approve each individual step. It monitors markets around the clock, flags anomalies, settles routine trades, and logs everything for regulators automatically, essentially a coworker who never needs the Wi-Fi password because it never logs off in the first place. Lloyds expects to pull in more than £100 million in value this year by scaling this kind of system across the bank, on top of the roughly £50 million it already banked last year. Citi, meanwhile, just made all 175,000 of its employees, essentially the entire company, take mandatory training on how to actually work alongside it.
Nobody's technically being fired for this, at least not yet. The real message is closer to: learn to supervise the robot, or eventually answer to it. Citi's own leadership has been candid that this will change what people do for a living day to day, which is corporate speak for update your resume, just, you know, calmly, and preferably before Kevin in compliance finds out from a LinkedIn post.
Most new employees take months to earn real trust and a swipe card that opens every door. This one got signing authority in its first week, and unlike Kevin, it has never once expensed a steakhouse dinner to a client it never actually met.
Sources: Lloyds Banking Group — 2026: The Year of Agentic AI, and a New Era for Finance (https://www.lloydsbankinggroup.com/insights/2026-the-year-of-agentic-ai-and-a-new-era-for-finance.html); American Banker — Citi Mandates AI Prompt Training for Most Employees (https://www.americanbanker.com/news/citi-mandates-ai-prompt-training-for-most-employees)