The requirement
UBS will require graduates and interns applying to join its global banking and markets division in 2027 to demonstrate AI proficiency before they are hired, the Financial Times reported. Candidates must show they can use AI to “improve work outcomes and efficiency”, assessed through interview questions about their practical experience with the tools.
“As AI fundamentally reshapes the financial services industry, AI skills and experience have become a crucial component of future career success,” the bank said. It added that AI literacy complements rather than replaces academic ability, analytical skills and interpersonal communication, all of which remain core to its recruitment.
The contrast with the rest of the street
The interesting part is what UBS is not doing. Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan have both been shrinking junior analyst classes as AI takes over the entry-level work — the modelling, the comparable-company screens, the first draft of the research note. The implicit logic is that if a machine does the apprenticeship tasks, you need fewer apprentices.
UBS is running the other experiment: keep the intake, change the entry criteria, and treat the tools as something the candidate should arrive already holding rather than be trained on. Spain’s Santander has taken a similar line, seeking “senior AI users” for some corporate and investment banking graduate programmes.
What it does to the pipeline
Both approaches have the same unresolved problem underneath them. Junior banking roles have always been training positions, where judgement is acquired by doing work that a senior person then corrects. If the work is done by a model and checked by a junior who has never done it unaided, the correction loop that produced senior bankers is missing a step. JPMorgan’s leadership has publicly cautioned against over-reliance on the tools for roughly this reason.
Requiring AI fluency at the door does not answer that. It selects for people who can operate the tools, which is a different competence from being able to tell when the tool is wrong.
What to watch
The 2027 intake is the first cohort hired under the rule, so the test is a year away and the evidence will be slow. The nearer signal is whether other banks copy the criterion or the class-size cut. Recruitment requirements spread quickly across the industry because graduate programmes compete for the same candidates, and a requirement that one bank can enforce is one the others can adopt in a single hiring cycle.
