"AI has made my junior banking job more miserable than ever"

29 April 2026

3 minute read

I am a junior investment banker at a major US bank in London. I work in M&A for the sort of bank everyone wants to work for.

My life is awful.

I am fed up with banking. I am fed with the hours. I am fed up with the work. I am fed up with the managing directors (MDs). I thoroughly hate this existence.

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I keep hear banks saying that AI will make junior banking jobs more interesting. This is absolutely not my experience. AI has made my banking job more miserable than ever.

My role has now become entirely about prompting. I am no longer in the weeds, analysing company data. I am formulating prompts, formatting slides and working towards fake deadlines. It's endless churn until the early hours of every morning. There's a whiff of desperation in the air. We're not pitching to big corporations but doing bake-offs to mom and pop shops, and I'm not on a mid-market team.

This is the job. AI has made it more demanding. Senior bankers, aware of the alleged productivity benefits of AI, think nothing of piling demands on top of me. My workload has doubled. It doesn't help that the ratio of senior to junior bankers has risen and that they have stopped hiring in the belief that we can all do more.

At this stage, I simply want to get out. My aspiration is to work in private equity. PE gives me a shot at a role with actual meaning. I hope it is somewhere where my work can actually count for something, rather than being about a business development meeting that will head nowhere. But PE is not easy to get into and everyone that I know is applying.

I am not sure what to do, but I am feeling pretty desperate. My costs are high and I'm not sure what the solution is.

Charlotte Brighter is a pseudonym.

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AUTHORCharlotte Brighter

Insider Comment

Ro
Rob420
30 April 2026
Theres an old apple keynote where Steve Jobs and a guy from Cyan are showing off Riven on the Mac, and he jokes that with all the time you’ll save with their other productivity stuff you’ll have time to play this game, and everyone laughs, except watching it decades later I wasn’t laughing, because that’s not how it works is it? Proposed productivity gains via tech == increased expected productivity, but strangely, never increased wages, now similarly AI is seen as a way to save money, a way to get rid of people and then throw even more work at the few who are left, who can just be paid the same because yOu HaVe aI nOw! as if there is no limit to your capacity for context switching etc, massive scam, amusingly it is quite interesting to use ai to ask it to plot wage growth against productivity and inflation…
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Me
Merlo
29 April 2026
I fully understand you, Charlotte. My job, although more academic, has become the same way. People are so enthusiastic about writing papers with AI, but the workload has just doubled. It's only about prompting, the production of AI-generated ideas—quick ones—without any social goal, just for the sake of remaining in this race of publishing or perishing.
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