• For the first time, Warren Buffett won't be hosting Berkshire Hathaway's shareholder meeting.
• New CEO Greg Abel will take center stage this weekend and field hours of questions instead.
• Attendees predicted a more sober Q&A and a smaller gathering, but still expected a good time.

Berkshire Hathaway is about to hold its iconic shareholder meeting — without Warren Buffett as host.

Tens of thousands of people are expected to descend upon Buffett's hometown of Omaha this weekend for a gathering dubbed "Woodstock for Capitalists."

As usual, they can shop for Squishmallows plushies and Fruit of the Loom sweatshirts, picnic at Nebraska Furniture Mart, hunt for deals on jewelry at Borsheims, take part in the Brooks Running 5K, and watch a live Q&A with Berkshire's top brass.

However, Buffett won't be sitting on stage, taking questions while munching See's Candies and drinking Coca-Cola. He doesn't want to steal the spotlight from Greg Abel, who succeeded him as Berkshire's CEO at the start of this year.

Business Insider will be on the ground reporting from the conference, and before jumping on a flight to Omaha, we asked Berkshire experts making the trip what they're expecting this weekend.

The Abel effect

Buffett is renowned for his wit, folksy wisdom, and willingness to hold forth on virtually any topic, from marriage and nuclear weapons to politics and corporate malfeasance.

In stark contrast, Abel isn't a household name and hasn't shared much about himself or his views on non-Berkshire subjects. That could make for a more sober and restrained Q&A.

"Greg will be responding to questions in a businesslike manner but without Warren Buffett's humor and personal stories," David Kass, a finance professor at the University of Maryland, told Business Insider.

Brian Gongol, a Buffett superfan and Berkshire shareholder for nearly 20 years, praised Abel for upholding Buffett's core principles. But he said the new boss "can't help but sound more like an accountant than like a founder."

The Q&A is "likely to feel a lot like when one very capable artist performs a cover version of someone else's song," Gongol said. "The lyrics and the melody will stay the same, but the interpretation will give the audience something new."

Eric Schleien, who said he's attended every Berkshire bash since 2006, told Business Insider that Buffett's absence won't feel "like the headliner canceled."

"It's more like the band is still playing, and now the lead guitarist is finally getting to step forward," said the founder and CEO of Granite State Capital Management and host of "The Intelligent Investing Podcast."

A more hardcore gathering

The Berkshire meeting simply won't have the same appeal with neither Buffett nor his late business partner, Charlie Munger, in the hot seat this year.

Gongol predicted that locals and devotees will still make the pilgrimage to Omaha, but there will be fewer international travelers and "people we used to be able to talk into coming along for the ride on the basis of Buffett's star power."

Yet he said that Berkshire recognizes the value of its unique shareholder culture and how it directly influences Berkshire's prospects, and may well lean on "clever marketing work" to draw in crowds.

His fellow Buffett fans might also attend "just for the chance of capturing a glimpse of the legend from across the room," Gongol added.

"The people who show up this year are going to be the real ones," Schleien said. "You have to actually care about Berkshire's business and culture to come out for Greg Abel. I'd expect fewer people but a higher quality crowd."

Bigger than Buffett

Kass, the finance professor, and Larry Cunningham, the director of the University of Delaware's Weinberg Center and the author of several books about Berkshire, said they expected around 25,000 to 30,000 people to show up — down from the peak figure of around 40,000.

But Cunningham was still optimistic about the city's vibe this weekend.

"So much subculture has grown around Berkshire wholly apart from Warren, Omaha will still be abuzz," he said.

He quoted a line from his 2014 book, Berkshire Beyond Buffett: "Warren's greatest achievement was creating an organization larger than himself."

• Jain Global is pivoting to manage money exclusively for Millennium, its founder's former employer.
• Jain Global will return about $6 billion to investors.
• The deal gives Jain Global access to Millennium's resources to accelerate its growth.

In a surprise move, one of the largest hedge fund launches in recent memory is returning money to its investors and striking a deal to invest exclusively for industry titan Millennium Management.

Nearly two years after launching with $5.3 billion in commitments from high-profile investors, including the sovereign wealth funds Abu Dhabi Investment Authority and GIC, Bobby Jain's multistrategy firm, Jain Global, is making a major pivot. The firm will now only manage money for a single client — Jain's former employer, Millennium — according to an internal memo seen by Business Insider and sources with direct knowledge of the deal.

Jain Global, which has six offices and over 400 employees — half of whom are investment professionals — will retain its independence while gaining access to Millennium's platform and resources in a deal that's expected to close in the coming months, according to the memo.

"Under the proposed agreement, Millennium will have exclusive access to the full investment capacity of Jain Global's multi-strategy business," the memo from president and chief operating officer Ajay Nagpal reads. "Jain Global will remain an independent firm, retaining its own investment processes, operating model and talent base."

The deal, which was first reported by Bloomberg, is expected to close in the third quarter, one of the sources said. Representatives for Millennium and Jain declined to comment.

A buzzy hedge fund launch hit by big costs

Jain Global launched in 2024 with enormous ambitions, creating a multistrategy giant from scratch. It manages $6 billion across seven business lines and trades a sweeping array of strategies and asset classes. It has struggled to deliver returns for investors almost from the get-go, under the weight of hefty startup costs.

Jain Global has gained $1.3 billion in gross revenue since inception, according to an investor familiar with the figures. But investors, including bank wealth management platforms and university endowments like UTIMCO, have seen only a fraction of that amount.

Jain gained just 0.5% in six months of trading in 2024. In 2025, its first full year of trading, it produced a net return of 3.7%, trailing its peers as pass-through expenses ate into gross returns in the mid-teens, Business Insider first reported. Multistrat peers delivered double-digit gains each of the last two years on average, according to a benchmark from industry research firm PivotalPath.

Singapore's sovereign wealth fund GIC requested to redeem $250 million earlier this year.

Why its swapping investors for Millennium

Part of the deal rationale is accelerating Jain's growth while helping mitigate some of its costs, unlocking what both parties believe is a promising investment foundation. Jain plans to hire 15 additional portfolio managers by year's end, a person familiar with the matter said.

"The way we have structured our business, our processes, our risk — it all rhymes with Millennium's. That makes this as smooth a transition as possible," Jain, who was co-CIO of Millennium from 2016 to 2022, told staff on an internal call Monday, according to a person familiar with the matter.

"For Jain Global, this partnership unlocks the full platform advantages of Millennium, including our infrastructure, resources and stable longer-term capital structure," the Millennium memo says. "We collectively believe this partnership will materially accelerate Jain Global's growth while reinforcing the attributes which have contributed to its early success."

Millennium, one of the world's largest hedge funds at $84 billion in assets under management, has in recent becomes one of the most significant backers of external hedge fund talent, seeding experienced investors with capital, often through separately managed accounts.

A deal with the size and structure proposed with Jain is more rare, echoing its arrangement with WorldQuant, Igor Tulchinsky's systematic spin-out.

Jain was down 2.7% this year through March, but had clawed back in April to a 0.6% gain, Business Insider has learned. A Jain spokesman declined to comment on company performance.

• Last year, Goldman named Kunal Shah co-CEO of its international business and global co-head of FICC.
• Shah made partner at just 31, having climbed to the top after about a decade with the bank.
• He spoke with Business Insider about the EMEA tech scene, global volatility, and the bank's future.

Not many people can say they've made partner at Goldman Sachs. Even fewer can say they did it at the age of 31.

Kunal Shah can say both.

Shah joined Goldman Sachs as an analyst in the firm's trading business in 2004 and rose to partner in about a decade. Last January, he was promoted to two new roles: co-CEO of Goldman Sachs International and global co-head of fixed income, currencies, and commodities. Based in London, he also holds a seat on the bank's overarching management committee.

As part of a new series of Q&As we're kicking off with some of Goldman Sachs' top executives, Business Insider had the chance to sit down with Shah to discuss Europe's tech sector, Goldman's presence in the Middle East, and what the financial industry's embrace of AI means for newcomers' careers.

Here's our conversation with Shah, edited for length and clarity.

What do you recall from those early years, and how did senior bankers mentor you during your ascent?

After graduation, what struck me when I hit the trading floor as a full-time analyst was that I had access to the then-partners, even when I was just a new kid on the trading desk. When I became a partner, I found the interconnectedness — your ability to make a call to any partner anywhere in the world, offering a clear baseline of trust — amazing.

I would call out Ashok Varadhan, who I have worked with since day one, and who is now the firm's co-head of global banking and markets. I first met him when he agreed to meet for a coffee when I was a fresh analyst and visited New York for my training in 2004. He was already a partner, but he took the time to connect, and we stayed in touch when I hit the trading floor in London. He would listen to my views and he welcomed debates around risks or initiatives.

From him, I learned to have a laser focus on risk management, but also a willingness to take and scale risk where there is opportunity in the business.

As new analysts hit the desk this summer, how do you see AI affecting the long-term outlook for bankers and traders?

Junior talent are inherently tech-savvy, and they don't have the legacy of why we do things in a certain way. They can see how to disrupt us.

Even when I was an intern, people were telling me, "Don't rotate into fixed income trading desks — it's all going to get automated." A lot of the administrative tasks that junior people used to do were no longer needed because we were able to leverage technology and tools to achieve scale.

For me, AI is just another natural extension of that. More of the mundane work — whether that's making presentations, building Excel models, or booking trades — doesn't need to be done in the same way.

The bottom-up experimentation I see across the whole organization is powered by the tools we've released. Once you equip your people with these tools, they can experiment and find things that could be game-changing.

If young people come in with the mindset of actually helping us to disrupt things, and to embrace the change, I think the experience they can have in this industry can be phenomenal.

You're at the helm of Goldman Sachs International as co-CEO of GSI and global co-head of FICC. What's the most interesting facet of being in those seats right now?

The common thread across both roles — and the thing I love most about them — is that no day is the same.

Working in FICC means you're right at the intersection of politics, macroeconomics, geopolitics, and how each of these interact at the micro level with different sectors and markets. Part of the job is balancing long-term strategic views with the constant flow of markets. Even now, if you look at this moment in time, there is uncertainty around commodity markets and you need to watch how that feeds into the monetary policy decisions of central banks, asset allocation shifts and more. There is almost consistency in the uncertainty, and that is inherently exciting to work amidst.

As co-CEO of Goldman Sachs International, I have been exposed to a much broader range of clients across the firm. Across the region, we've got around 29 offices — which means we have people, we have clients, and we have interactions with key policymakers, regulators, finance officials, and central bankers.

The US appears to be leading in AI investment and infrastructure. What's your outlook for the EMEA tech landscape, and how is that changing?

Over the last decade, the number of unicorns in the broader European context has tripled. The tech space in EMEA is much broader than people realize.

In terms of capital markets being US-centric — there is definitely an element there when you're talking about the hyperscalers, and this huge amount of AI-related debt issuance we're seeing. Many of those large tech platforms are quite US-centric. But I wouldn't say exclusively.

You can remember companies like DeepMind and others very much coming out of the tech ecosystem in Europe.

We are witnessing what is arguably the largest investment cycle in history, with our research teams estimating that hyperscaler capex could reach between $700 billion and $725 billion in 2026 alone.

While the US and China lead the LLM race, we also see a distinct competitive edge for the EMEA region at the AI application layer. European entrepreneurs are taking core models and building specialized, high-value software to solve industry-specific problems in robotics, autonomous drones, and smart factories.

As the conflict in Iran continues, how do you view the potential impacts of the Middle East conflict for Goldman's international businesses?

We have five offices in the region — in Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Doha, Riyadh, and Kuwait — and over 100 people. In the past 12 months alone, we announced our office opening in Kuwait, a new office in Riyadh, and the onshoring of our private wealth business there. We are active across advisory, financing, markets and as an asset manager and investor.

The countries in the Gulf Cooperation Council have managed the situation very well so far, both from maintaining a safe environment but also ensuring that the countries continue to operate with a good sense of as much normality as possible given the situation.

Once we move beyond the current conflict, the renewed focus on infrastructure and resilience will bring other opportunities for us to help our clients, and our presence there enables our ability to do so.

• Berkshire Hathaway's annual meeting is next week, but Warren Buffett won't be hosting.
• New CEO Greg Abel will welcome tens of thousands of shareholders from across the world to Omaha.
• Berkshire gurus want Abel to share his plans for stocks, businesses, cash, and leadership.

What is Berkshire Hathaway without Warren Buffett in charge?

Tens of thousands of shareholders are hoping to find out when they descend on the legendary investor's hometown of Omaha next week.

They're making the pilgrimage to attend Berkshire's annual meeting, dubbed "Woodstock for Capitalists" because it attracts a huge crowd of like-minded investors for a weekend of learning, networking, and celebration.

But for the first time, Buffett won't be hosting the gathering. Instead, it will be Greg Abel, who took over as Berkshire's CEO at the start of this year, marking the end of the business icon's six-decade run.

Business Insider asked five Berkshire gurus what they'd like to hear from Abel next week. They shared questions about his management approach, plans for Berkshire's cash pile and stock portfolio, and even his personal life.

1. Trailing the index

Berkshire stock has declined 14% since Buffett's surprise retirement announcement on May 3 last year, while the S&P 500 has gained 26%.

David Kass, a finance professor at the University of Maryland and a longtime Berkshire blogger, said he would like to hear Abel's "explanation for Berkshire underperforming the S&P 500" by roughly 40 percentage points in under 12 months.

2. Money mountain

Berkshire held a record $373 billion of cash, Treasury bills, and other liquid assets at the end of December. That figure exceeds the market value of Chevron ($371 billion), Palantir ($365 billion), and Cisco ($355 billion).

Buffett, perhaps the world's foremost bargain hunter, struggled in recent years to deploy Berkshire's cash as stock valuations surged, acquisition prices soared, and even buybacks grew unattractive as Berkshire shares climbed.

Now Buffett has stepped aside, it's up to Abel to put that money to work.

"What are his plans to invest $373 billion in cash?" Kass asked.

Brett Gardner, an analyst and the author of "Buffett's Early Investments," raised the prospect that Berkshire might use its dry powder to purchase Buffett's roughly 14% stake in the business, a position worth $138 billion.

"Does Berkshire plan on buying Warren's stake in a negotiated transaction someday?" he asked.

3. Leadership revamp

Abel has made a few changes to Berkshire's top brass since taking over, most notably appointing NetJets CEO Adam Johnson as president.

Johnson and Katie Farmer, the CEO of Berkshire-owned BNSF Railway, will join Abel onstage for the second Q&A session.

Larry Cunningham, the author of several books about Berkshire and the director of the University of Delaware's Weinberg Center, told Business Insider he's looking forward to seeing Abel engage with the two subsidiary CEOs, "a new practice that I hope will add tremendous value to the meeting."

Gardner is also looking for indications of whether Abel intends to appoint other divisional leaders like Johnson. Under Buffett, subsidiary CEOs reported to Abel as the head of the non-insurance businesses, and Berkshire's insurance chief, Ajit Jain.

Chris Ballard, a managing director at Check Capital Management, said he was curious about Ted Weschler's expanded role at Berkshire. Abel touched on that in his first shareholder letter, following the departure of the other investment manager, Todd Combs.

Ballard said he was hoping Abel would share "some details on how often he sees Ted, how often he is in contact with Ted, and what sort of behind-the-scenes responsibilities Greg leans on Ted for."

4. Stocks and subsidiaries

In his first shareholder letter, Abel listed Berkshire's core stock holdings as Apple, American Express, Coca-Cola, and Moody's, leaving out two large positions — Bank of America and Chevron.

Ballard said he was "very interested" to hear Abel's thoughts on Berkshire's stocks and what kinds of businesses he'd consider adding to its core portfolio.

He also highlighted that almost nothing is known about Abel's investing experience.

"We don't know what Greg's past personal or professional investment performance looks like, and we are very interested in him describing some investment successes and failures, so we can get a sense for what we might expect going forward," Ballard said.

Paul Lountzis, a longtime Berkshire shareholder and the president of Lountzis Asset Management, said he was curious whether Abel would look to offload any subsidiaries. Buffett famously offered businesses a permanent home, which distinguished Berkshire from other buyers.

"Does he see Berkshire selling any businesses if they receive offers to buy some of the companies at attractive prices?" Lountzis asked.

5. Hands-on vs. hands-off

Buffett and his late business partner, Charlie Munger, structured Berkshire as a decentralized web of autonomous subsidiaries, which allowed them to focus on allocating capital inside and outside the company instead of running the businesses themselves.

Abel is a more hands-on manager and may demand more of Berkshire's businesses. He wrote in his letter that Pilot had ranked second in a study of travel centers' popularity, and he wouldn't be pleased until it takes the No. 1 spot.

He also noted that Berkshire first invested in Pilot in 2017 but was "contractually delayed" from managing it until 2023, and said, "that mistake will not happen again."

"His comments were uncompromising and could be taken as unwelcoming," Ballard said. "In the past, Buffett wanted Berkshire to be seen as a great home for a long-held family business, and he would remain hands off and allow the current owners to have autonomy. Abel's comments could deter such owners from approaching Berkshire in the future."

Ballard asked whether Abel would promise a permanent home to potential sellers, and whether he would allow the same level of autonomy as Buffett and Munger did or seek to optimize businesses after buying them.

6. Getting personal

Buffett is famous for his investing prowess, his philanthropy, his frugal lifestyle, his junk-food diet, and more. Very little is known about Abel by comparison.

"What does his typical day look like?" Kass asked. "What percentage of his time is spent on travel to Berkshire's companies? How many hours per day does he spend on investment research, such as reading 10-Ks?"

Ballard said he's eager to learn "more about Greg as a person, both personally and professionally." He suggested Abel could talk about his love of ice hockey, his formative life experiences, his philanthropy, and his friends in the business world.

"It'd be nice to hear stories about some interactions that have taken place with other professionals, who he admires — other than Buffett — and what inspires him," Ballard added. "What books does he like? What movies, etc.?"

7. Next generation

Berkshire has already seen its biggest shake-up in decades, and there could be more changes to come.

Gardner said he'd like to know who will succeed Jain, who turns 75 this summer, as insurance chief. Lountzis inquired about how Abel is working with his lieutenants to line up successors for when Jain and other executives step down.

Buffett has headlined Berkshire's big bash for decades. Shareholders are about to find out what it's like when he's not running the show.

• JPMorgan promoted 135 executives in global banking and markets to the rank of managing director.
• Two of the bankers previously made Business Insider's Rising Stars of Wall Street list.
• Here's what the newly minted MDs told us last year about their careers at the bank.

JPMorgan announced its newest class of managing directors earlier this week, elevating hundreds of employees across divisions to the firm's highest title outside the C-suite.

The bank promoted 135 people in its global banking and markets, and two of the investment bankers made Business Insider's Rising Stars of Wall Street list last October, which tracks some of the most impressive up-and-coming dealmakers and investors.

Here's what they told us last year about their now even more distinguished careers.

Florian Plath

Florian Plath, who was 34 when he made Business Insider's list, started at JPMorgan as an intern in the London office, and now works with leading technology clients in its mergers and acquisitions group. He's advised on various multibillion-dollar transactions, including Altair's $10.6 billion sale to Siemens, Maxim Integrated's $29 billion all-stock merger with Analog Devices, and Broadcom's $90 billion acquisition of VMware, one of the biggest tech acquisitions to date.

Plath said there's a common thread between some of the biggest deals he's worked on: teams must mobilize quickly and solve problems in a dynamic, fast-moving market.

Plath is from Germany and based in San Francisco, but has studied in Asia and lived in London. He said his international upbringing and experiences have "further sparked my interest in global markets."

The newly minted managing director told Business Insider he's an avid runner, enjoys golf and tennis, and believes sports keep him grounded in a high-pressure field.

"For me, it has always been a team sport," he said of his job, "doing what's right for our clients, the firm, and the employees."

Jack Levendoski

Jack Levendoski is also a banker in JPMorgan's mergers and acquisitions group, and similarly focuses on technology transactions. He's worked on Twitter's $44 billion sale to Elon Musk, the $21 billion merger of World Wrestling Entertainment and UFC, and Palo Alto Networks' $25 billion acquisition of CyberArk.

Levendoski, who was 35 when he last talked to Business Insider, moved often growing up, partly because of his dad's job in the oil and gas industry. He lived in Louisiana, London, Nigeria, Indonesia, and Australia, and said the experience helped him learn to adapt quickly and appreciate diverse viewpoints. He's used that flexibility when advising on hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of deals.

Many of those deals had touched on AI when Levendoski last spoke to Business Insider. Being an early adopter of the technology has given him "quick answers to hard questions that perhaps before required significant research," he said.

Levendoski joined JPMorgan in 2016, after starting his career as a facilities engineering project manager at Chevron. He's keen to mentor others, just as people mentored him: "I saw the value that it created for me, and so I've tried to play that forward."

• Citrini Research's "Analyst 3" is the toast of Wall Street over a wild report from the Strait of Hormuz.
• Market watchers praised the analyst's bravery after Citrini said it had sent him to the strait.
• They shared memes and compared him to everyone from James Bond and Ethan Hunt to Johnny English.

Finance types can't stop talking about Citrini Research's "Analyst #3" and what the firm says was a wild trip to the Strait of Hormuz.

Wall Street's denizens and market watchers across the globe rushed to X to commend the intrepid analyst with memes, GIFs, and kudos-filled posts.

Citrini's field report said that its analyst, who it says is fluent in four languages, traveled to the shipping channel at the heart of the US-Iran conflict with "a Pelican case full of equipment, a pack of Cuban cigars, $15,000 in cash and a roll of Zyn."

Analyst #3 wrote that he snuck recording equipment into Oman, faced questioning from border officials, intelligence agents, and the coast guard, and swam in the Strait of Hormuz with a cigar in his mouth and Iranian drones flying overhead.

Citrini included a disclaimer in its research note, saying that some names and details had been changed to "protect the safety of anonymous sources" and that quotes were based on the analyst's memory of conversations he had in Arabic.

The firm described this as "the best we could do from an accuracy standpoint," noting that the analyst's phone, which contained notes and photos from the trip, was held by authorities in Oman.

The analyst reported that there were significantly more vessels passing through the strait than tracking platforms show, and said the situation was closer to a "toll road" than a "blockade," with Iran demanding that every vessel secure its approval to pass through safely.

Citrini Research rose to prominence for betting against Silicon Valley Bank before the lender collapsed in early 2023 and helped trigger a regional-banking crisis. It also rattled markets this February when it warned AI could crash the stock market and spark a recession.

Roughly 20% of global oil and gas flows travel through the Strait of Hormuz, making it a key shipping channel for world energy markets and a major contributor to economic growth.

But traffic has plummeted since the breakout of the war between Iran and the US and Israel, as captains fear being struck by an Iranian drone, blasted by an underwater mine, or hit by a missile launched from the coast or a passing speedboat.

The disruptions have lit a fire under energy prices, stoking renewed fears of inflation and recession. Analyst #3's audacious decision to visit the contested waterway in the middle of a full-blown war has clearly impressed finance professionals, who've compared him to James Bond, Mission: Impossible's Ethan Hunt, and even the bumbling Johnny English.

Michael Burry, the investor of "The Big Short" fame, hailed Citrini's on-the-ground coverage on his Substack, describing it as "remarkable stuff."

• JPMorgan software developers say the bank is raising its expectations for AI use.
• Internal company communications reveal the bank's new AI targets.
• The updated objectives affect members of its global developer workforce.

JPMorgan Chase's message to its global armada of software developers is clear: embrace AI or risk falling behind.

Internal company documents seen by Business Insider and posted to JPMorgan's intranet for employees lay out a series of new expectations for the bank's software engineering workforce, who comprise the majority of its 65,000-person-strong Global Technology division. The newly listed objectives, published on the intranet earlier this month, say all software and security engineers are expected to "drive excellence" by adopting AI and "contributing to initiatives that improve productivity, speed, scalability, and impact."

One document authored by the bank's human resources leaders laid out two core objectives for software engineers: step up their coding game, and start harnessing AI to save time and get more done. The new language about objectives "will be added automatically and will appear by the end of March," an image of the document on the intranet showed — a reference to upcoming changes to employees' goals expected to take effect at the end of this month. The firm also instructed workers to develop clear goals with their managers that align with the bank's new objectives.

"Demonstrate measurable improvement in code quality, speed and productivity through regular use of approved AI coding assist tools, contributing to the team's overall efficiency targets," read one goal written by HR. "Engage in identifying, implementing and optimizing AI-driven automation opportunities within technology lifecycle management (TLM) processes to drive efficiency and support capacity unlock initiatives, ensuring all enhancements leverage current technology assets before considering new solutions."

A spokeswoman for JPMorgan declined to comment.

JPMorgan is among Wall Street's biggest spenders on technology and artificial intelligence, with projected tech investments reaching roughly $20 billion in 2026 — far exceeding peers like Goldman Sachs. Across corporate America, companies including Meta and Google have begun pushing employees to adopt AI tools and, in some cases, evaluating their use.

Business Insider spoke to five engineers across the bank who said the push to adopt AI has been felt far and wide — in managerial conversations, in intranet posts, and through dashboards that display who's using certain AI tools, and who's not. They added that discussions about productivity and AI adoption have become more frequent in recent weeks. It all comes as developers get ready for a pilot of Anthropic's Claude Code to be rolled out as soon as April, said a longtime IT developer in the Global Technology group. Claude Code would be made available alongside the four other large language models coders are already using: two from OpenAI's ChatGPT, and two from Anthropic's Claude.

'Anxiety' among developers

The developers Business Insider spoke to said they've been encouraged to use AI tools for a wide range of tasks, from writing code to preparing presentations. One dashboard that tracked adoption and usage of the bank's GitHub Copilot appeared to show details as granular as which employees had installed it and identified individuals as "light," "heavy," or "non" users.

For some, the message has added pressure inside a firm that has drawn scrutiny in recent years for its use of internal monitoring tools and performance tracking. Business Insider published a series of reports on the firm's Workforce Activity Data Utility in 2022, a program that collected data points about how employees were spending their day — from the length of video calls to how long they spent drafting emails to where they were sitting in the office.

"There's a lot of anxiety in the environment right now," the longtime IT developer said. Those who don't use AI risk being seen as underperforming, the developer said. Another developer said their manager said in a recent meeting that availability of the new AI tools comes with an "expectation" that velocity and output should show "a noticeable increase" quarter over quarter.

Three of the five developers Business Insider spoke to said the tools are helpful, despite discomfort over the tracking.

New performance dimensions

The updated guidance on AI use comes as the bank implements other adjustments to how it ranks workers' success on the job. Going forward, the bank said on the intranet portal, it's streamlining some of the primary "dimensions" it uses to grade employees, pivoting to using two categories: "what you achieve" — business outcomes — and "how you achieve it," including adherence to the firm's behavioral principles.

According to screenshots from the bank's intranet, JPMorgan will segment workers into three buckets: "stand out" for those who exceed job standards, "achiever" for the majority of employees, and "needs improvement" for those who require "additional support" and have struggled to perform consistently.

Another page Business Insider reviewed listed skills non-managers working in software engineering were expected to display across "all performance dimensions." One is "Data Fluency," noting that the skill is applied by those who develop and drive "adoption of new tools or methodologies to leverage data in the flow of work." "Rate of adoption" is cited as one measurement of the employee's impact toward exhibiting the skill in practice.

The documents from the JPMorgan intranet echo the firm's long-standing culture of internal monitoring and data collection, making clear that continuous performance tracking is vital for keeping workers on target throughout the year.

"You and your manager will use your objectives to track your progress during the year, recognize impact, and streamline your annual review," the firm wrote on an internal page tied to goals.

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• Jamie Dimon said he remains optimistic about the future of the Middle East, despite the war in Iran.
• The JPMorgan CEO said surrounding countries are all aligned in wanting peace.
• He tied peace to foreign investment in the region, where certain cities have become financial hubs.

While the war in Iran poses short-term risks because of its uncertainty, Jamie Dimon thinks the conflict might ultimately create more long-term peace.

The JPMorgan CEO said on Tuesday that he remains optimistic about the region's future, despite the war in Iran.

"Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, America, Israel, all want permanent peace in the Middle East," he said at the Hill and Valley Forum in Washington, DC, adding that Israel should do more toward beginning to set up a "rational" Palestinian state. He said that the countries' attitudes toward peace have evolved over the past decades.

Investment, he said, is a key driver.

"You know what they all want, too, when you go there? Foreign direct investment. There's a lot of foreign direct investment going there, but it won't go there if things like this are taking place," he said. "So I think they realize they need permanent peace."

Major cities in the UAE, including Dubai and Abu Dhabi, have emerged as financial hubs in recent years, attracting investors.

"They can't have neighbors lobbing ballistic missiles into their data centers, thinking that people would put $10 billion in a data center," he added.

President Donald Trump said on Monday that he'd had "productive conversations" with Iran about ending the war, sending stocks soaring, but Iranian state media denied that the talks had taken place. Some market pros have said there might not be an easy off-ramp for the conflict.

Data centers, a growing focus of global investment, have also become targets in the war, now well into its third week. Amazon said that drone strikes had damaged three of its data centers in the region earlier this month.

"Data centers have become the new infrastructure for economies," James Lewis, senior advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Business Insider in early March. "If you think about how people are going to build infrastructure, before it was railroads and steam engines. Now it's data centers and fiber optics."

• BNY's CEO, Robin Vince, is all in on AI's role in steering the bank's future.
• Now, some managers oversee the bank's 140 digital employees, a form of agentic AI.
• We spoke to Vince and a BNY managing director about the program.

Despite its 240-year pedigree, BNY isn't showing its age.

Under CEO Robin Vince, who took the reins in 2022, the firm — founded by Alexander Hamilton — is aggressively embracing AI. Recently, it has begun entrusting some managers with oversight of a contingent of new workers who don't even require a chair: the digital employee.

"All digital employees report to a human manager," Vince said in an interview with Business Insider this month in Palm Beach.

These digital employees create a layered effect with the company's agentic products, in which a single entity coordinates the activities of multiple individual agents. The digital workforce is more than 140 agents strong, each one with roughly two dozen skills, give or take, comprising their suite of abilities.

And, just like humans, they're held accountable for their work — with performance reviews.

After executing a variety of tasks humans might find tedious, the digital employee presents it to "the human who's responsible for the process — 'I've just done three quarters of the work for you. And by the way, I did it in 10 minutes instead of what would have otherwise been two weeks," the CEO explained.

About 100 managers across the firm oversee digital employees, including Rachel Lewis, a managing director and a two-decade BNY veteran who now serves as head of AI enablement for operations. Appointed to the role this year, Lewis is now helping teams across the bank build and deploy digital employees within their day-to-day workflows.

"We're kind of transferring the mundane to the machines," she said, describing how the tools are taking over routine processes and shifting how work gets done.

Lewis told Business Insider she works closely with teams across BNY to help them develop their own digital employees — often starting with ideas that come directly from the people doing the work and turning them into tools over time.

"The person that came up with that idea actually gets the opportunity to build that digital employee," she said. As teams begin to incorporate them into their workflows, she added, the technology starts to feel less like software and more like part of the team. "It's just almost having a virtual teammate as part of your group."

170,000 hours of training

To prepare for the AI age, BNY implemented a massive 170,000-hour AI training program for its 48,000 staffers. "Everyone in the company has done two to three hours," he said. The goal was to turn employees into a new class of supervisors who managed, rather than competed with, the machine. "We're investing in our people, because I want them to be the unlockers and users of AI," Vince added.

Last week, he sent a memo to several thousand of the firm's senior leaders pointing to some of the firm's past efforts in AI and encouraging them to be proactive in continuing to incorporate it. "We have an obligation to our company to capture this opportunity," Vince wrote in the email, whose subject line was "Reimagining BNY."

"This is a fundamental leadership shift, not simply a capability shift," he added. "It will require each of us to lean in and role-model how to engage with AI and how to harness it to solve problems."

Speaking to Business Insider, Vince described his first personal deep dive into AI as a "summer project" that kicked off in 2023 and never ended.

It was sparked by a YouTube video he saw that broke down the functionality of Tesla's Autopilot 12. He watched as the car observed human behavior and applied what it saw to navigating a stop sign, rather than adhering to a few rigid lines of code. "It was very clear to me that the future of AI was going to be learning to make decisions," Vince said. He wanted to bring that same adaptive intelligence to the bank. "It was highly applicable to our businesses," he added, "and it would be able to be a very fundamental input to how we actually ran the company."

Expanding the digital workforce

While some of the earliest digital employees have applications focused on straightforward fixes like data repair and data capture, Lewis said the tools that have stood out most are those that make it easier for employees to build and refine their own digital employees.

Building a digital employee starts with observing how work is actually done. Teams record themselves completing tasks step by step, allowing the system to analyze different approaches and identify the most efficient way to perform the work. That output is then used to generate the instructions that guide a digital employee, which are refined over time as teams train the system on new variations of the task.

Lewis said that as digital employees become embedded in workflows, teams are also treating them more like members of the workforce. "There is a performance review," she said.

Managers evaluate how the systems perform by reviewing outputs, identifying where they skip tasks or "didn't perform as expected," and feeding that work back into the system to be retrained on new variations and edge cases.

"We're continuously monitoring them," she added. "Every week it gets a little bit better."

Even as it expands its digital workforce, Vince said there are no plans to cut back on human capital; these tools, he said, are meant to supercharge their workflow, but not take responsibilities out of their hands. "I speak to CEOs who say, 'We're going to downsize, massively, our campus program.'" Vince's reply? "Why would you do that?"

"We've got the opportunity to have young people who are pre-trained in AI, enthusiastic, and be able to add to our business in different ways," he said.

• IBM's consulting arm monitors the work of AI agents using a real-time dashboard.
• IBM says AI agents have sped up security investigations, cutting task time from 45 to a few minutes.
• IBM Consulting's revenue reached $21 billion in 2025, driven by demand for AI solutions.

At IBM's consulting arm, the future isn't a slide deck or a strategy memo — it's a live dashboard where humans monitor the work of AI agents in real time.

Earlier this month, Mohamad Ali, senior vice president of IBM Consulting, walked Business Insider through the dashboard that the company both uses internally and recently released to clients.

"Every hour I can see what's going on with all the humans associated with digital workers," and vice versa, he said. "That is the new consulting model going forward."

The dashboard is known internally as "Consulting Advantage." The company unveiled it in 2024 to help its own consultants build and manage teams of AI agents. This January, it unveiled "Enterprise Advantage," a similar version of the platform for clients that allows them to build and manage AI agents at scale.

In recent years, the firm has made itself the testing ground for building and deploying digital workers as it prepares clients for a future defined by AI. Ali said the firm has digital staff working side by side with humans on more than 150 client engagements.

Take the example of a typical security operations center, he said. When an alert comes in, a human investigator would normally spend about 45 minutes combing through logs to figure out what went wrong and what to do next. At IBM, he said, that process is increasingly handled by AI.

Digital workers first "generate an investigation plan." Then they execute it in real time. Multiple agents tackle different parts of the problem simultaneously, passing tasks back and forth, he said. Then they run a risk analysis and produce a report. The process now takes just a couple of minutes. The findings are then passed back to a human — with key actions highlighted — and the human verifies it.

In January alone, IBM used this approach to complete 52,000 investigations, Ali said.

IBM has evolved dramatically from its early days as a maker of mainframe computers into a key player in the AI boom. The company said its generative AI department was valued at $12.5 billion during its fourth-quarter earnings call.

Its consulting department, especially, has seen an uptick due to demand for generative AI and services that help clients implement it. Consulting revenue for 2025 came in at over $21 billion, up from about $20.7 billion in 2024.

IBM Consulting has been around for decades. The company acquired PwC's consulting arm in 2002. PwC would later rebuild its consulting business after a five-year noncompete clause expired.

IBM Consulting now employs about 150,000 employees and says its work overlaps with the Big Four and more technology-focused firms like Accenture.

"We don't do, like, what markets you should be in," Ali said. "We do strategy around 'how do you take your corporate strategy and implement it?'"

And right now, he said, there's a big question in corporate strategy: How do you prepare for a world where humans work alongside AI agents?

• Allison Sheehan ran a baking business while working in private wealth at Goldman Sachs.
• She left Goldman after she said the firm told her she couldn't keep her online brand.
• Now, she's using her Wall Street skills, like capital allocation, to scale her cake business.

This as-told-to is based on a conversation with Allison Sheehan, 26, a former analyst for private wealth at Goldman Sachs and student at Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management, where she's building her baking brand, Alleycat. Business Insider has verified her roles at Goldman and her current school enrollment. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Baking cakes started out as a college hobby — I'd make them for my sorority sisters and, once word got out, the broader Dallas community. When I landed a job in operations at Goldman Sachs in Utah, I stopped baking entirely, though I still longed to build up my cake empire. I had no family, no friends, no nothing in Utah, and was focused on getting transferred to New York.

I eventually got a job in the wealth management unit in New York. It was a part operational, since I was opening accounts and managing money, but also client-facing, which I loved.

As soon as I got to New York, I restarted my baking social media accounts, which had around 500 followers at the time, and announced that I was back in business. Orders picked up, but I didn't have time for all of them, so I capped it at three cakes a week, creating a scarcity model. I sold out weekly for about 6 months before expanding to up to 10 cakes.

That's when I started struggling to fit everything in, but I was getting good traction, making cakes for companies and fashion houses, like Goop. A typical day meant waking up at 5 am to frost a cake, going to the gym, going to work, baking a cake, going to dinner with friends, and going to sleep. I spent all my spare moments invoicing clients or editing videos. In 2023, my friend's boyfriend said I should post under the handle "investment__baker," but I was careful not to mention anything about where I worked or my exact job.

I learned valuable skills at Goldman

Goldman's high-stakes hustle culture has helped me build the brand — I had to be responsive, communicative, and accurate, all skills I use now. I always quickly consolidate my notes and immediately flag any concerns to product developers or suppliers. On the communication front, I'm able to connect people across the supply chain, from technical food scientists to more creative-minded brand designers. And when it comes to accuracy, I'm precise about costs, even on volatile products like cocoa, and margins.

In wealth management, I learned a lot about capital allocation, helping clients balance their portfolios and plan for expenses. But I learned just as much from my own failures.

After I started taking on more orders, I rented a commercial kitchen on the Lower East Side to bake and teach workshops. It solved logistical problems but drained my bank account. Every penny I made from baking went toward rent, and I eventually had to return to my apartment. That was definitely not a good capital allocation strategy, since it almost left me broke.

Goldman gave me an ultimatum

At that point, I knew I needed to go all in on my business and decided to apply to business school. Studying for the GRE while working and running the business was unsustainable.

My health deteriorated, and I broke down at work, having a panic attack and sobbing to my very understanding VP. I went home to Wisconsin for two weeks, shut down all of my social media accounts, and brought my brand to an awful, screeching halt.

Six months later, I reopened the account, with 2,000 fewer followers and almost no DMs. The momentum came back quickly, though, until, boom: Goldman's compliance team called me in and asked me to delete all of my content or leave the firm. They said the word "investment" on my social handles alluded to my job, and I had to delete everything. After finishing my business school interviews a few months later, I un-archived all of the content, got called in again, and quit.

I couldn't waste the five years of time and energy I'd poured into this business.

Goldman is still helping me now

I've scaled back my custom cake business and am focused on building my consumer packaged goods products: dry cake mixes and frosting, like the kind you can scoop out of the jar. I've finished the formulation, secured suppliers, and gotten my nutritional label approved, but I'm still struggling to find a manufacturer.

Small brands have to convince manufacturers they're a worthwhile investment. From their perspective, why spend time onboarding a tiny Instagram baker who could easily fail?

That's where Goldman has come in. Beyond knowing how to build a nice deck and balance a budget, my background at such a prestigious firm lends me credibility. It comes up in conversations, and I'll include it in presentations, since I'm proud to have worked there. The firm is relevant to my online brand, too, since I still post as the investment baker and share investing advice.

I'm making a fraction of my Goldman salary, but I'm fundamentally a creative person. I couldn't spend my life behind a desk. When I started, my goal was to make a cake for a celebrity, which I've done multiple times, including for Brooke Shields. Now, I want to bring home baking back — and revolutionize the grocery aisles.

• If the AI boom ends up a bust, it won't be nearly as brutal as the dot-com crash, Igor Pejic says.
• The "Tech Money" author said Big Tech's self-reliance, varied businesses, and deep pockets help.
• However, he said the rise of index funds means a market slump would have widespread impacts.

If the AI boom collapses, it won't be as catastrophic as the dot-com crash — but the shockwave will be felt far and wide, Igor Pejic says.

The banker and author of a new guide for tech investors titled "Tech Money" told Business Insider this week that Big Tech's unprecedented dominance will limit the magnitude of any market decline.

Pejic underscored the greater "stickiness" of companies like Alphabet and Microsoft compared to the leading companies of the past, such as Exxon Mobil, General Motors, and IBM.

Big Tech companies have remained dominant for decades partly because of their platform models, which give them "almost limitless pricing power" and make them "almost impossible to dislodge," he said.

In other words, they've become powerfully entrenched by attracting so many users, app developers, hardware suppliers, advertisers, and other parties to their ecosystems over time. Now they can easily hike their fees, and new market entrants struggle to capture any market share from them.

Pejic also pointed out that Apple, Meta, and their peers have successfully navigated multiple technological shifts, such as moving from desktop computers to mobile devices and from on-premises IT equipment to cloud hosting.

Big Tech companies also throw off gobs of cash, enabling them to place several big bets at once, and fund their investments instead of relying on costly external financing. Pejic described that as a "moat" against rivals, especially in an AI race characterized by "tremendous infrastructure costs."

Shades of the past

Pejic drew several parallels between the AI boom and the dot-com bubble. The similarities include a game-changing technology, partnerships and financing deals between key players, the buildout of network infrastructure, and "extreme" valuations, he said.

Yet Pejic said an AI crash would "not be as devastating as the dot-com bubble when it burst."

Any market sell-off will be briefer and less severe because today's tech giants have highly profitable core businesses, he said, meaning their stock prices won't collapse completely if their AI bets flop.

They're also less likely to suffer a cash crunch or trigger a financial crisis given their limited reliance on bank funding, and investors have been more discerning about which AI stocks they buy versus rushing to own any business with ".com" in its name, he said.

Pejic did raise some concerns, including the fact that so many companies are spending huge amounts to build the best AI model possible, but the market can probably only support a few of them in the end.

He also flagged the immense amount of investor cash riding on a handful of tech stocks, given the rise of index funds that own indexes such as the S&P 500, which is weighted by market capitalization and thus intensely concentrated in the Magnificent Seven.

"It's very difficult to find a place to hide if this really goes down," Pejic said. "If you're keeping your money in the stock market and AI goes down, it will affect everything."

He noted that risk will only become greater as AI giants such as OpenAI, xAI, and Anthropic go public and join the index, increasing everyday investors' exposure to AI.

Pejic said owning Big Tech stocks was "perhaps the safest way" to profit from AI, given their self-reliance, vast resources, and diversified businesses, which should limit their downside and insulate them from industry shocks such as the emergence of DeepSeek.

For example, he praised Apple's approach of refraining from spending hundreds of billions on microchips and data centers, in favor of seeing how the AI race plays out, and partnering with peers or buying in capabilities to harness the tech.

Apple might not be the "most exciting company," but for investors, owning it is a "clever and quite safe strategy without burning too much cash," he said.

• Kalshi's cofounders said their platform was designed to help random people flourish.
• They said their best market makers "may not actually be the experts or the authority figures."
• One of their favorites is an "Ariana Grande superfan" who knows a lot about music charts.

The brains behind Kalshi say some of their best prediction market makers are "actually random people."

"The foundational principles around prediction markets, is like a lot of these markets, the people that will price them the best may not actually be the experts or the authority figures that you usually would think about," Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour told Stripe cofounder John Collison during a recent episode of Collison's "Cheeky Pint" podcast.

Mansour said there's no single demographic for these "super forecasters," who comprise some of the prediction market giant's most important users. Out of the group, Mansour and cofounder Luana Lopes Lara have some favorites — including "a guy from Kansas."

"The best inflation forecaster on Kalshi over the last few years is not— none of the institutions or the big-name hedge funds," Mansour said. "It's this guy who lives in Kansas, never traded financial markets before, just likes to read the news, and just knows how to predict inflation. He can feel it."

Lopes Lara said his favorite user is an "Ariana Grande superfan."

"He found Kalshi during the election season, and he's like, 'I don't like the elections, whatever.' Then he found our Billboard ranking markets of like charts," she said.

The user, Lopes Lara said, has made over $150,000.

"He paid back student loans. He put himself through a master's degree, bought a car, and all those things," she said. 'And he just like loves these markets. And he's never really traded, never done anything like that before. But it's the first time that he actually has a way to monetize this very compulsive hobby that he had on music charts."

Mansour also shouted out Alan Cole, a 37-year-old economist in DC, who told The Wall Street Journal that he wagered his life savings against DOGE by betting on a Kalshi prediction market on whether federal spending would increase. (Mansour did not mention Cole by name, but the economist's story has been publicly reported.)

"Now you have a market that if you have that sort of knowledge, which maybe oftentimes is esoteric, like I'm assuming none of us have read all these tax codes, you can actually go out in the world, do research, get smarter about the world, and then get rewarded for that," Mansour said.

Kalshi has exploded in popularity since the 2024 election, when it successfully sued the US government to allow users to bet on the outcome of US elections, something that had previously been allowed only overseas.

The Trump administration has said it will ease up on prediction markets. Michael Selig, chair of the Commodity Futures Exchange Commission, has threatened to fight with state regulators who say they have the power to regulate sites like Kalshi or its rival Polymarket.

Congressional lawmakers are also looking to rein in prediction markets after high-profile news of potential insider trading as well as bets on events like the war in Iran. Kalshi has stressed that it has policies against insider trading and doesn't allow trades on war or death.

• Two consumer bankruptcy attorneys said they're seeing more younger clients.
• The lawyers cited rising living costs and stagnant wages as drivers of the trend.
• They also said they're seeing more clients with massive debt, thanks to online gambling.

For some young adults crushed by heavy debt loads, bankruptcy has emerged as an escape hatch.

Two consumer bankruptcy attorneys told Business Insider they've seen a noticeable uptick in Gen Z and young millennial clients, ages of 25 and 35, in recent years — with one saying their share has increased severalfold.

The lawyers pointed to soaring living costs, lagging wages, and the ease of racking up credit card debt as key forces behind the trend. Factors like buy now, pay later loans and online betting are accelerating the rate at which some young people spiral into debt, they said.

"We're definitely seeing more young filers, and it's not because they're irresponsible," said Florida bankruptcy attorney Chad Van Horn. "It's because they entered adulthood during one of the most financially distorted environments in decades."

Personal bankruptcy filings in the United States have been on the rise since their COVID pandemic-era low in 2022. Still, they remain far short of the post-Great Recession peak in 2010, when cases topped about 1.5 million.

More than 533,000 individual bankruptcy cases were filed last year, according to the American Bankruptcy Institute, citing data from Epiq Bankruptcy Analytics.

Nearly 333,000 of those 2025 filings were Chapter 7 cases — the most common form of personal bankruptcy — which can erase most unsecured debts, including credit card balances or medical bills.

Chapter 13 filings, which involve a repayment plan to pay down some or all debts, accounted for just over 200,000 cases.

"What we're seeing is sort of the hangover from several years of government stimulus and all the various economic things that have driven up costs and expenses while keeping wages fairly flat," said Ed Boltz, a North Carolina bankruptcy attorney.

High consumer debt for young filers

Although there's no comprehensive, official data source tracking the ages of bankruptcy filers in the US, both Boltz and Van Horn said young adults are now showing up in greater numbers than before, pushing Van Horn's firm to rethink how it markets to clients.

"It's extremely surprising," said Van Horn, adding that 30% to 35% of his firm's roughly 4,000 clients last year were between the ages of 25 and 35. Historically, he said, that age group made up just 5% to 10% of the caseload.

The surge in younger clients has forced Van Horn's law firm to change its marketing strategy, the attorney said.

"We need to be where the 25 to 35 year olds are because they're not necessarily in the same place that the 55 year old is getting their information from," said Van Horn.

As Business Insider has previously reported, a wave of recent TikTok videos shows young people championing bankruptcy as a way to wipe out massive amounts of debt. Some called bankruptcy the "best" decision they've ever made.

Boltz said his firm handled about 2,000 bankruptcy cases in 2025, with about 20% of clients in the 25 to 35 range. He noted that it's unclear whether young adults now represent a larger share of filers overall or whether the increase reflects the broader rise in cases.

Even so, Boltz said his firm has seen the greatest growth in bankruptcy filings from young adults and seniors in recent years.

Young filers often carry significant student loan debt, which is generally not dischargeable in bankruptcy. They also face escalating housing and living costs that put more strain on their budgets, the attorneys said.

Ready access to credit cards, personal loans, and buy now, pay later programs has compounded the problem, making it easy for young people to rack up debt quickly, they said.

"That formula is just a bad formula for Gen Z," said Van Horn, who explained that many once relied on gig work to close budget gaps. "But a lot of them are burning out, and that work isn't paying what it used to."

He said substantial consumer debt is a common factor among his younger clients. And for some, online sports betting has become a major contributor to that debt.

Gambling debts are also on the rise

Both Van Horn and Boltz told Business Insider that they've been seeing a growing number of young clients — men in particular — with tens of thousands of dollars in credit card debt accumulated through online gambling.

"The gambling is really the one that has in the last year, year and a half, really taken off," Boltz said, adding, "We've started to see people with $20,000, $30,000, $40,000 of fairly rapid credit card that they've incurred" through online betting.

Van Horn said he's increasingly seen younger people get "addicted to gambling," a trend he believes is being amplified by a culture of FOMO or fear of missing out.

It's the idea, he said, that "everybody's making money, everybody's having fun" and then "you get involved, and you lose all your money."

Popular sports betting companies like DraftKings and FanDuel have recently stopped accepting credit card deposits for bets. DraftKings ended the practice in August, and FanDuel followed earlier this month.

The crypto-based prediction market Polymarket has allowed users to fund their accounts with credit cards since 2024.

"We are seeing a lot more where we have clients who are very young, mid 20s, early 30s, who overwhelmingly tend to be men, who have run up pretty massive credit card debts gambling," said Boltz.

"The apps are explicitly designed to part you from your money."

Are you a young person who has filed for bankruptcy or is considering filing for bankruptcy? Contact this reporter via email at nmusumeci@businessinsider.com.

• YouTuber Caleb Hammer drags people for their poor financial decisions on his show "Financial Audit."
• He revealed the one mistake he sees people make the most — and why it's not entirely their fault.
• He also shared what he splurges on, having paid down his own debt.

YouTuber Caleb Hammer has built a career digging into people's poor money decisions on his show, "Financial Audit."

He says there's one mistake he sees most consistently.

"It's the cars," he said during a wide-ranging interview with Business Insider. "People are obsessed with getting whatever big truck or SUV that has the new year on it. And they say it's the safety features, because, you know, we were making cars one year ago that were just killing everyone. So you've got to get the 2027 Ford F-150 Turbo edition."

Hammer, who also sells a budgeting app, Dollarwise, and financial education courses, conceded that it's not entirely people's fault that they fall into the car trap.

"You need to have a car to have a job, and you need to have a job to have a car," he said. "We have that endless loop because we have horrible public infrastructure in this country. We built everything around the car. So people are stuck in that loop."

Still, he said, people will also try to justify spending beyond their means on their "dream car."

"It doesn't make sense," he continued.

Hammer, 31, speaks from experience. He once racked up $120,000 in debt by paying for college, a car, and some impulse buys. He taught himself about money management, which inspired him to start his show.

Now, he has a mortgage and a modest amount of debt, and has shifted his priorities. He spends on the occasional dinner out, his dogs, and hiring good people for his company.

"I still love McDonald's," he said. "I try not to get it, and my girlfriend doesn't want me to because it's bad for me. But at least I can afford it."

Hammer said he doesn't see the financial situation of everyday Americans improving anytime soon, especially with the rise of buy-now-pay-later services.

"With Klarna being baked into everything and Afterpay, unfortunately, I have a feeling the show's going to be going till I'm done," he said.

Read our full interview with Caleb Hammer here.

• Ryan Lake and Stephen Rooney lead JPMorgan's beverage banking business.
• Beverage M&A is expected to rebound, and they said big brands want to capitalize on the wellness boom.
• The bankers broke down where they turn to spot regional trends and the advice they're giving CEOs.

When Ryan Lake and Stephen Rooney scan a bar menu, they might spot a drink they once evaluated — or helped sell.

The JPMorgan bankers cover the beverage industry, talking to everyone from executives to beer distributors to lawyers to retailers to figure out where consumer tastes are headed.

After a slowdown last year, partly due to tariffs, the pair is prepping to leverage that expertise as beverage M&A is expected to rebound in 2026, according to the investment bank Capstone Partners.

"There's been so much activity in the smaller space — bigger players buying smaller brands that are higher growth, maybe more health and wellness focused," Rooney said.

Lake, who joined JPMorgan in September and is based in Arizona, has covered beverages for more than 20 years and now focuses on mid-cap and fast-growing insurgent brands. In his previous role at Arlington Capital, he advised Stone Brewing on its $165 million sale to Sapporo. New York-based Rooney, who focuses on large-cap brands like Pepsi and is a leader on the investment bank's consumer and retail team, has spent nearly 15 years in the sector. He recently advised Alani Nu, an energy drink brand, on its $1.8 billion sale to Celsius, a deal that helped Celsius diversify its portfolio and reach more women.

Their partnership fits into JPMorgan's middle market banking push, working with a team of nearly 300 bankers across the company focused on founder-run companies rooted in local economies. Business Insider spoke with Lake and Rooney about opportunities in the beverage sector and the advice they're giving CEOs.

Large companies are eager for growth and increasingly turning to acquisitions to expand into new categories, price points, and geographies, the bankers said. That requires them to collaborate closely, since together they share insight across the market.

Spotting the next trend

The pair relies on what Lake calls an "early radar system," built on continuous communication with an ecosystem of companies, buyers, and investors. They might, for example, be able to spot a hot regional brand before it blows up on a national scale.

In a small, tightly knit industry with high barriers to entry — from dense liquor laws to understanding the cost of shipping water — relationships are crucial.

"If you do things the right way, it's a massive accelerator, because people will give you good referrals and talk well about you," Lake said. "If you do things the wrong way, everyone knows who you are pretty quickly."

Right now, large and small brands are trying to cash in on the boom in functional beverages, whether that's in the form of energy drinks or protein shakes. But Lake said that trends shift quickly, and today's protein maxxing could give way to something else, like a fiber craze.

Even so, he and Rooney caution clients against chasing every single trend, and often talk about staying focused. While M&A can drive growth, exploring too many options can risk losing or diluting a brand's identity.

Gen Z's drinking isn't so simple

If health drinks are having their moment, alcohol is struggling — but some of the issues may be overstated, Lake said.

Gen Z and those on GLP-1s are often cited as drinking less, and the rise in GLP, though the bankers said the reality is more complicated. Some Gen Z consumers are under 21, and those who can legally drink might be financially strapped.

"You're paying out the arm and the leg for housing and healthcare and for fuel — it's hard to actually go out and drink when you don't have the money for it," he said, adding that it could be years before we know whether alcohol is in a structural decline.

Just as the long-term alcohol trends are unclear, the beverage sector generally is as volatile as consumer tastes, which Lake and Rooney said can make it especially exciting. They've started lending to a company doing $5 million in revenue, only to watch it grow into a brand worth hundreds of millions.

"You do see that sort of meteoric rise of companies, because of the ever-changing consumer demand," he said.

• Jeffrey Epstein victims and Bank of America reached a settlement in a class-action lawsuit.
• The terms haven't yet been publicly disclosed.
• JPMorgan paid $290 million and Deutsche Bank paid $75 million for similar lawsuit settlements.

Bank of America settled a proposed class-action lawsuit from Jeffrey Epstein accusers who alleged the bank facilitated the now-dead pedophile's sex-trafficking operation, court records show.

Lawyers for the bank and a group of Epstein accusers told the judge overseeing the case during a pretrial conference last week that they "reached a settlement in principle," according to a Monday update to the case's docket.

The terms of the settlement were not made public.

US District Judge Jed Rakoff, who is overseeing the case, gave a March 27 deadline for the parties to file public documents laying out the settlement's terms, and an April 2 hearing to decide whether to approve them.

"The women entrapped and abused by Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell started a monumental reckoning with their brave voices and fearlessness," Sigrid McCawley, an attorney at Boies Schiller Flexner representing the Epstein accusers, said in a comment. "The road to justice for these women has been long and trying. Today's resolution of the case against Bank of America is one more step on the road to much deserved justice."

A representative for Bank of America declined to comment. In previous public statements and court filings, the bank denied wrongdoing.

The settlement scuttles a scheduled deposition for Leon Black, the billionaire ex-CEO of Apollo Global Management, which was set for March 26.

The accusers' lawsuit had alleged that Black's more than $150 million in transfers to Epstein — which Black has said was for financial and estate-planning services — facilitated Epstein's sex-trafficking. Bank of America should have paid closer attention to Black's accounts and any transactions related to Epstein, the lawsuit said.

Black has separately been asked to testify before the House Oversight Committee, which is investigating Epstein, on May 13.

JPMorgan agreed to pay $290 million, and Deutsche Bank agreed to a $75 million payout, to settle similar lawsuits brought by the same group of lawyers representing Epstein victims.

Rakoff previously tossed a parallel lawsuit the attorneys brought against BNY — formerly Bank of New York Mellon Corp. — but allowed portions of the case against Bank of America to move forward.

In an earlier court hearing, Rakoff said he would be disappointed if the cases against BNY and Bank of America didn't go to trial.

"I don't want to discourage you from settling," the judge said. "There are some of my colleagues that think settling is always the way to go. But I'm much more selfish and I would love to see two very good trials."

• Saul Van Beurden thinks employers and employees share responsibility for AI adoption.
• Wells Fargo doesn't mandate AI use; instead, it aims to generate "grassroots enthusiasm."
• Van Beurden said employees need new skills to stay competitive for both redeployment and new jobs.

Saul Van Beurden is the man helping Wells Fargo confront a question hanging over banks of every size: What happens to jobs in the age of AI?

He and his central team can't, and shouldn't, figure out what an AI-ready Wells Fargo looks like alone. The bank must teach employees skills to stay competitive in a changing industry, and they must choose to learn them, Van Beurden said.

"You cannot deny things," Van Beurden, who is the head of AI and the co-CEO of consumer banking and lending, told Business Insider. "But how do you make it a thing where everybody has a role to play and takes their own accountability and responsibility?"

The bank is leaning on AI literacy programs and demos, among other things, to hopefully inspire "grassroots enthusiasm." The goal is to make employees comfortable enough with the technology that they can be redeployed if their jobs change, or competitive in the job market if they leave Wells Fargo, he said. Wells Fargo doesn't mandate AI usage, even as it bets the technology will help supercharge its growth following the Federal Reserve's decision to lift a $1.95 trillion asset cap.

Van Beurden thinks that fluency starts outside the office. He's trying to build an agent to help pull documents for his 2026 tax returns, and believes it's crucial for employees to use AI in their personal lives, too.

"It's really important to have that personal usage, to understand the power of what it can do. And then we are enabling that and allowing that to happen at the workplace," he said.

Still, Van Beurden emphasized that everyone needs to "stay cognitive," since AI could generate all of our ideas if we let it. He suspects that most college students are comfortable with technology but should invest time in activities like reading or playing chess. Staying sharp, he thinks, will help them in what's broadly a brutal job market.

Wells' workforce, like many of its competitors, is already changing because of AI. The bank's CEO, Charlie Scharf, said in November that it will probably "have less head count as we look forward," and added in December that generative AI has already made engineers up to 35% more productive.

Van Beurden didn't say whether the bank would need 30% fewer engineers as a result or whether it would necessarily alter hiring, leaving it at, "it's a great question." Instead, he said that growth and head count aren't always one-to-one.

"How great is it to grow without the need to hire people, because you have created the capacity to take on more clients, to take on more customers with the same amount of people?" he said, calling AI the "ideal tool" for that growth. Wells Fargo recorded $21.3 billion in revenue in the fourth quarter, up 4% year over year; revenue in its consumer bank, which Van Beurden oversees, rose 7% year over year.

The leaders of other big banks have also said that AI will likely eliminate some jobs and slow hiring, both publicly and in internal memos. JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon has said his bank has "huge redeployment plans."

Efficiency promises and big technology budgets aside, the head count cuts haven't yet materialized at most banks. Around 60% of 240 financial services CEOs surveyed by EY said they expect AI investments to maintain or boost their head count this year.

• Demarre Johnson, 23, appeared in a viral photo shoot published by Interview magazine last week.
• PwC on Friday confirmed Johnson had left the company, saying he departed in mid-February.
• A person familiar with the matter told Business Insider his exit wasn't related to the magazine pictorial.

One of the "finest boys in finance" — whose splashy magazine spread last week was the talk of Wall Street — is no longer with his firm.

In a statement to Business Insider, PwC confirmed that former associate Demarre Johnson is "no longer an employee and left the firm in mid-February."

Johnson went viral last week after he and three junior bankers were featured in designer clothing in an Interview magazine photo shoot published March 4. A person familiar with the matter said his departure was not related to his magazine appearance.

The 23-year-old, who spoke with Business Insider twice after the magazine story, didn't comment when a reporter reached him on Friday.

The Babson College graduate talked to Business Insider last week about being chosen for the spread, saying he knew it would make headlines because "controversy sells."

"My initial reaction was, 'Oh, they're going to clown us because we think we're pretty,'" Johnson said. "That's exactly what happened."

The photo shoot generated instant discourse among Wall Street insiders who took to social media to vent about the stereotypes they said it portrayed and the unofficial rules it broke — including not outshining your bosses.

Bankers buzzed about whether the participants — who also worked at Goldman Sachs and Barclays — got approval from their employers before going in front of the cameras. Goldman said that "media relations did not approve these interviews." The other firms didn't comment at the time.

Johnson, who has a vibrant social media presence, said on Monday that he's been careful about social media posts he's made about his job. "If I built the multibillion-dollar bank business, I would hate if one of my associates formed my company's image with one video," he told Business Insider.

Other participants in the shoot have avoided the spotlight since its release, but Johnson reposted feedback about the story on his social channels.

"I'm viral on twitter," he said in one post, with four crying emojis.