AI Is Replacing Junior Work. What That Means for Finance Teams

For decades, a career in finance started the same way. Junior analysts built the models, formatted the decks, pulled the comparables and did the research nobody else had time for. That first rung of the ladder is changing quickly.

The numbers

• Fewer young hires in AI-exposed roles: research from Stanford and King's College London, analysing millions of job records, found that early-career hiring (ages 22–25) in AI-exposed roles fell 19% below expected levels.
• Leaders are slowing entry-level hiring: 66% of global enterprise leaders say they are reducing or slowing entry-level hiring plans because of what AI can now automate.
• Advisors are already using AI: AssetMark's 2026 insights report that 85% of financial advisors now use AI tools, and 55% save four or more hours a week per advisor.

Capacity, not headcount

The last figure matters most for finance firms. Four hours a week is about a tenth of a working week, per advisor. Across a team, that is time that used to justify another administrative or back-office hire. Firms are not necessarily cutting people. They are adding capacity without adding headcount.

The same shift is reaching corporate finance

Much of the work that sits with junior analysts in an advisory firm is structured and repeatable: first-pass due diligence, investor research, building target lists, drafting outreach. That is exactly the kind of work AI now handles well.

It does not remove the need for judgement. Someone still decides which mandates to take, how to position a company and when to push an investor. What changes is where people spend their time: less on assembling the inputs, more on the decisions.

This is the gap Astel is built for. Its specialist agents do the analyst-level work, from a detailed due diligence report within an hour to investor matching across 80,000+ investors and personalised outreach, so a small advisory team can run more mandates without hiring more analysts.

The question nobody has answered yet

If junior roles are where people learned the job, where will the next generation of dealmakers learn it? Firms that use AI well will need to rethink how they train people as carefully as they rethink their workflow.

Sources: Stanford and King's College London research on early-career hiring; AssetMark 2026 insights.