Ai Instead of Analysts

📰 Welcome to career.credit 

Good morning, deal makers. It is Wednesday, 6 August 2025.

Banks have long been the boot camps that turn raw graduates into the Associates coveted by private equity and private credit firms. But what happens if the grunt work those juniors cut their teeth on is handed to large language models and automated modelling tools instead? (It is already happening…)

Spoiler: the hiring headaches begin about the time today's interns would normally be arriving on the buy side, roughly three to six years from now. Let us dive in 👇

🧠 Deep Dive: Will an LLM Take This Job?

1. Why banks are testing AI in the first place

   • Cost: A bulge bracket bank spends about 350k dollars all in per first year analyst. A bespoke Copilot licence plus an internal data lake costs a fraction.

   • Speed and coverage: Generative models now draft IMs, scrape comps and spin three statement models in minutes, freeing VPs from endless quick turn requests.

   • Regulation and security: Controlled on prem versions solve most data privacy objections that stalled adoption in 2023 and 2024.

2. What disappears from the training table

3. Knock on effect for the buy side

   • Shallower talent pool: Fewer analysts with twenty four month deal gym mileage.

   • Higher wage inflation: PE and PC firms may fight over a smaller cohort or pay premiums for laterals with true deal scars.

   • Longer ramp ups: New associates could arrive brilliant at prompt engineering but green on negotiations, accounting nuance and stakeholder wrangling.

4. Strategic responses we are already seeing

   • Residency programmes: Several megafunds are designing six month internal bootcamps to teach the human parts AI cannot: relationship mapping, credit committee theatre, tense borrower calls.

   • VP level hiring: Expect more lateral VP recruiting to plug the middle management gap that under trained associates will create.

   • Bank fund alliances: Some sponsors are quietly funding in house analyst classes at relationship banks in exchange for first look rights on standout juniors.

📘 Career Tactic: Run the Human Advantage Audit

1. List every task you touched in the last few weeks.

2. Mark anything a tweaked GPT plug in could do by 2026.

3. Circle what is left. Those are your edge areas. Get repetitions, mentors and formal training in them now.

4. Draft a one sentence pitch for each edge. Example: I translate chaotic founder narratives into board ready credit stories. Use it in reviews and interviews.

🧠 People who articulate their edge survive the Ai cull.

🔦 News Highlights

• Carlyle rides credit and secondaries boom. Q2 inflows hit 13.4 billion dollars with fee earnings up 18 percent, thanks mostly to its credit and AlpInvest secondary units.

• Asset backed private debt under the microscope. From wine to helicopters, investors are probing how easily collateral can be liquidated after years of feverish growth. Loss rates remain in basis points but only if assets are truly recoverable.

• Citi broadens its private credit push. The bank hired Aashish Dhakad, formerly of Ares, to head North America origination, signalling ambition beyond its 25 billion dollar Apollo tie up.

🧭 TL;DR

• Banks are automating analyst grunt work, threatening the traditional buy side talent pipeline.

• PE and PC firms may face even more of a junior talent shortage and higher costs within three to six years.

• Develop irreplaceable human edge skills such as storytelling, judgement and relationships.

• Carlyle numbers, Citi hiring and scrutiny of quirky collateral show private credit's rapid evolution this week.

New opportunities, sharper skills, better positioning.

See you Friday for our deep dive on 2025 recruiting trends.

— James
Founder, career.credit and Futura Search Partners