AI is on the desk now: the free courses worth a line on your resume
By SuperdayReps · Wharton MBA · ex-Greenhill · investment banking interview coaching
11 min read · updated September 28, 2026
Every bulge bracket now has an AI assistant in front of its analysts. JPMorgan's LLM Suite sits with roughly 250,000 employees, with Excel and PowerPoint modules bolted on. Goldman Sachs pushed its GS AI Assistant to the whole firm after a 10,000-person pilot, and David Solomon showed it drafting most of an IPO prospectus in minutes. Morgan Stanley's AskResearchGPT has served banking, sales and trading, and research since 2024. None of these firms says it is replacing analysts. All of them say the first draft is now the machine's.
That is the desk you are interviewing for. The technicals still decide the interview, but there is a new question underneath them, usually unasked and always assessed: can this person work with the tools the desk already runs on, and do they know what to check by hand afterwards.
What the desk uses it for
Strip the announcements down and the AI on a banking desk does four jobs.
- It reads. A 300-page 10-K, a data room, a stack of research. The assistant summarises and points at the page. The analyst still opens the page, because the summary is a claim and the filing is the source.
- It drafts. The first version of a company overview slide, a CIM section, a client email. Never the deliverable; the thing you rewrite hard.
- It helps in Excel. Formulas explained, a data pull cleaned. The model is still built by hand, because a number you cannot trace is a number you cannot defend in the room.
- It checks. Find every place the share count appears. Tell me where these two footnotes disagree. The good analysts adopted this one first, because it catches the error before the MD does.
Notice what is not on the list: which comparable belongs in the set, whether the growth assumption holds, the trust the client puts in the person across the table. That is the job. So when an interviewer asks how you use AI, the answer is not "for everything". It is: I use it to read and draft faster, I check everything against the source, and here is the time it caught something.
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Frequently asked
- Do investment banks actually use AI, or is it marketing?
- They use it, at scale, mostly for the work analysts used to do first. JPMorgan's LLM Suite is in front of roughly 250,000 employees. Goldman pushed its GS AI Assistant to the whole firm after a 10,000-person pilot. Morgan Stanley's AskResearchGPT has served banking, sales and trading, and research since 2024. None of them says it is replacing analysts. All of them say the first draft is now the machine's.
- Which free AI certificate is the best one for an investment banking resume?
- The one from the biggest name you can finish. For most students that is Anthropic's AI Fluency on Coursera, free including the certificate, then Microsoft and LinkedIn's Career Essentials in Generative AI, also free. Google AI Essentials, which everyone still calls free, has been a paid subscription since July 2026; Google's free route is the Generative AI Fundamentals badge on Google Skills. Harvard's CS50 AI is the heaviest credential here and free if you take it at cs50.harvard.edu rather than edX.
- How do you list an AI course on a resume?
- One row in Additional Information, beside Skills, Software and Interests: AI Certification, by issuer with the year. Not a section of its own. Two managing directors at different banks told us they put little weight on the certificates themselves; what they want is a candidate who can say where the tool is useful and where it is not. So the row earns you the question, and one bullet in an experience that shows the tool doing real work, with a number and a check by hand, is the answer.