By Adam Mills
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Picture a Wall Street banker working with AI, and the image is likely an analyst using it to build pitch decks, models and memos faster. Kevin Buehler sees a larger change coming: the structure of the firm itself.
As specialized AI tools move deeper into financial workflows, they could change who does the work, how senior employees interact with it and where human judgment sits in the process. During Newsweek’s recent “AI Impact Forum” webinar, “AI in Finance: From Individual Adoption to Enterprise Transformation,” Buehler, chief innovation officer at Rogo and senior partner emeritus at McKinsey & Company, said the impact in finance is beginning to move beyond individual productivity.
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Dr. Ranjit Tinaikar, host of the series, described Rogo, an AI company built for financial institutions, as part of a category of AI-native companies that blur older lines between software and services. Felix, the company’s agentic workflow for financial services, served as the main example for a broader discussion about what those tools could mean for bankers, investors and regulated institutions.
Buehler said Felix can handle tasks that once consumed large amounts of junior bankers’ time, from producing pitch materials and spreadsheets to helping analyze companies, scenarios and possible acquisitions. The question is what firms do with the capacity that gets freed.
“I think this elevates the work that folks can do,” Buehler said.
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Banks could use productivity gains to reduce late nights and weekends, he said, but they could also redeploy people toward clients, coaching or work that requires more judgment. Those choices could alter the shape of organizations built on layers of junior labor.
“Right now most firms look like pyramids because that’s what’s required to get the work done,” Buehler said. “We think we’re going to see a shift towards skyscrapers.”
In this model, senior managing directors or partners remain at the top. Below them is a layer of AI-knowledgeable professionals who know how to run complex workflows with help from automated systems. At the base is a fleet of agents, each specialized in different tasks within the domain.
The skyscraper frame raises the obvious question about jobs. AI may remove some of the manual work that made large analyst classes necessary, but Buehler did not describe that as a simple replacement story. He said firms will have choices about whether the time saved becomes cost reduction, client coverage, training or new types of work.
Buehler pointed to DBS, the Singapore bank, as one example. He said the bank improved its technology, data and AI capabilities, then retrained people who were freed up and sent them to pursue mid-market commercial banking customers. The result, he said, was revenue and share growth, not a pure cost-cutting exercise.
He did warn, though, that the period of change could be uneven.
“I am on balance optimistic,” Buehler said. “The one thing I am cautious about is the transition.”
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Adoption inside financial firms may not happen evenly either. Tinaikar raised a pattern familiar to many technology rollouts: Senior executives talk about new tools, while junior employees are often the first to actually use them. Buehler said the same pattern has appeared with AI.
“Almost every AI tool that I’ve seen, you have more junior adoption than senior adoption initially,” he said.
Rogo’s experience suggests design can change that pattern. Buehler said more senior users may adopt AI when it fits the way they already work. He described using Felix from his phone or by email, asking it to produce analyses and then iterating as he would with a team.
Adoption gets harder after the first wave of users. Junior employees may be the easiest starting point. Senior adoption is harder. The next stage is changing entire workflows, such as an end-to-end M&A process, rather than using AI only to accelerate pieces of existing work.
In a sale process, Buehler said, AI could help with gathering documents, building financial models, preparing a confidential information memorandum, creating a virtual data room, responding during due diligence and running parts of the bidding process. The challenge is connecting those steps without breaking security, compliance or accountability.
In finance, the constraint is especially important because AI cannot simply act on behalf of a firm without oversight.
Buehler said Rogo documents include citations so every number can be traced back to source material, whether it came from public filings, market data or internal files. Bankers then have to check more than polish. They have to decide whether the underlying judgment makes sense.
“I think we’re all going to have to understand how to do that with AI as the input to the system, but not the final output,” he said.
The governance challenge extends beyond checking individual documents. Buehler, who previously helped lead McKinsey’s risk and cybersecurity work, said AI raises the bar for security practices. He described Rogo’s use of strict data retention policies, continuous penetration testing and a security advisory board, while noting that banks also test new models and features themselves.
Rogo’s approach keeps the company close to the work itself. It combines the Felix platform with forward-deployed bankers and engineers who help financial clients use it inside specialized workflows. The approach could pressure older software and services models, where vendors often stayed in narrower lanes.
Buehler said the lesson is focus. Companies building for regulated, specialized domains cannot be shallow generalists. They need to choose a market and build around its details.
“Get extraordinarily deep and understand your clients as well as they understand themselves,” he said.
AI can shorten the time it takes to build a deck or analyze a company. The real test is whether financial firms redesign workflows and train people for judgment-heavy roles without letting automation outrun oversight.
“Banks demand that you have a human who’s ultimately responsible,” Buehler said. “Nothing goes direct to the bank’s clients.”
Watch the full discussion between Tinaikar and Buehler in the video above.
You can sign up for the next “AI Impact Forum” webinar, “Is India on the Right Side of the AI Trade?” The upcoming session will examine whether India can capture more of the economic upside from artificial intelligence, from its technology services workforce and capital markets to financial infrastructure and investor protection.
It takes place on Thursday, July 23, at 10 a.m. Eastern and will feature Shri Ashishkumar Chauhan, MD and CEO of the National Stock Exchange of India.
Updated 6/23/26 at 10:22 p.m. ET: This article was updated for clarity.
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