David Solomon took over the CEO role at Goldman Sachs in 2018, during a time of geopolitical upheaval that would then become one of pandemic-induced economic disruption. In this interview with McKinsey’s North America Chair and Senior Partner Eric Kutcher, Solomon discusses what he’s learned and how he views current events and economic conditions (not surprisingly, after all he’s been through, he sees the glass as half full). Their interview spanned the current economy, the future with AI, and the sheer size of the CEO role. This is an edited transcript of their discussion. For more discussions on the strategy issues that matter, follow the series on your preferred podcast platform. This episode was recorded in December 2025.
Eric Kutcher: David, welcome. Your role gives you one of the most remarkable views of what’s going on in the markets and how they relate to the state of the economy. What do you think is allowing the markets to be more resilient than we might have expected given all that’s happening?
David Solomon: There are a handful of tailwinds that have supported a relatively accommodative economic environment. The first is the amount of fiscal stimulus since coming out of the pandemic, which is true of all developed economies. Here in the United States, we have political parties on both sides of the aisle that have adapted to a more fiscally stimulative policy position. And a handful of large companies are making big bets on AI infrastructure and spending a significant amount on it. That’s a big tailwind. We’re also seeing a more accommodative deregulatory environment. That’s freeing up people resources and spending that can be devoted to investment and growth. All those things have been quite constructive for the economic environment. One headwind that’s created more uncertainty and has probably slowed growth a little is trade policy. Overall, though, conditions have been quite constructive for the economy. And markets react to the economy.
Eric Kutcher: We’ve seen hiring slow down, and there have been some reductions, but that seems to have slowed. How are you thinking about that?
David Solomon: I think market participants believe large enterprises are constraining head count growth. I’ve talked to a number of CEOs who are really talking about, “Instead of letting my head count come down 2 percent, 3 percent, 4 percent as it has, can I basically keep my head count flat and create more operating efficiency as a down payment on AI capability?” If you think about that, keeping your head count flatter lets you actually generate more earnings growth. If you can increase the pace of earnings growth through those kinds of activities, maybe the market will assign it a higher multiple than when you are compounding head count growth, which obviously constrains earnings growth to some degree.
Eric Kutcher: How much of the cuts or attrition to enable AI investments is really just overhang in the existing employee base? And when do you think we’ll really start to see some of the benefit from AI?
David Solomon: There is another issue at play in that head count scenario. While organizations are investing in AI, we should remember that it’s normal for organizations to run a little bit fat, and so they probably do have some excess capacity to shed. CEOs probably feel more empowered by the AI imperative to hold the organization more accountable for thinking about efficiencies. But that’s separate from how quickly these organizations can create process change and embed the technology in the enterprise in a meaningful way. I don’t think you’ll see a lot of that in 2026. It’s really in 2027 and 2028 that you’ll see more meaningful progress from AI. It’ll be slower than people would like, because it’s hard to create process change. But I’m quite optimistic that it’s coming.
Eric Kutcher: Is it possible that some of this AI-related shift might create more turbulence? Is it possible we may shift resources too quickly and we hit some turbulent times from an overall employment cycle perspective?
David Solomon: I don’t think it’s different this time. Technology has been disrupting jobs and changing work patterns, labor behaviors, and productivity not just for decades but hundreds of years. What is different now is that the pace of change and innovation is accelerating, and that acceleration could create short-term disruption. But I think the economy is very nimble. If you create real efficiency, you have more capacity to invest in growth and other opportunities. Talent gets redeployed. People go where there’s opportunity. But I just don’t think it’s different from technological change of the past. It’s a reallocation of resources with significant productivity gains, as we’ve seen over my more than 40 years in business and the 40 years before that. I just don’t think it’s different this time.
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Eric Kutcher: I think there are fewer CEOs that are willing to take the other end of that bet, which gives me hope.
David Solomon: I haven’t heard a really cogent argument for the other side of that bet that fits with economic history. You’d have to argue that there’s something going on that’s truly different. When I started my career, I didn’t have a desktop computer. The productivity gains have been extensive from putting a computer on everyone’s desk, let alone a supercomputer in their hand. There’s been massive change in the way people work and the way things have evolved. Cell phones and technology and connectivity—we could go on and on about how these powerful tools have changed the way we work. Nobody has given me a cogent reason for why the economy doesn’t shift jobs into other places where you can invest and grow.
Eric Kutcher: I think the rate and pace of change here could be faster, but we’ll still need humans.
David Solomon: Also, the productivity gains of past technological advances actually made society wealthier overall on a per capita basis. And a wealthier society finds needs for new services and things that historically society hasn’t spent money on before. As that occurs, new industries sprout up that populate new jobs and new opportunities to serve the economy. It’s a powerful ecosystem.
Eric Kutcher: Let’s turn to your time at Goldman Sachs and your role as CEO. You really refocused the company, I would argue, to its historical core strength: trading, asset management, wealth management, and banking. But you’ve faced a lot of unique challenges. How do you see it?
David Solomon: The firm has been a private partnership for a long time. It went public in 1999, but it really was not operating fully over its first 15, 20 years as a public company. It was carrying a lot of the remnants of private partnership. The biggest example of that was that we really weren’t investing in growth. We were really operating year to year and running an enterprise that was much more geared to the partners than it was to shareholders. The firm had really not grown for about a decade. If we didn’t really start investing in growth, we were going to miss a big opportunity for the firm to maintain its leadership position as one of, if not the, most extraordinary financial institutions that’s out there today.
We rolled out our plan to invest in the growth of the business at the beginning of 2020, right before the pandemic. And so the revenues in 2019 for the firm were a high-water mark for the previous ten years, with $36 billion of revenue. Our earnings were $23 per share at that point. And we’ve grown it to $60 billion since then. We’ve more than doubled the earnings per share since then. And so we’ve really grown the firm. Our focus continues to be on executing on our strategy, which we think allows us to continue to grow the firm and continue to grow the firm’s earnings.
Eric Kutcher: Is there one particular thing that you changed that let you achieve this?
David Solomon: I think one of the things that changed in our mindset along the way is just focus. What are we really good at? What moves the needle? We had a lot of things going on that we were spending time and resources on that really weren’t moving the needle. Of course businesses always have to invest in trying new things. But focus has been very helpful for us. We have two big businesses—Global Banking and Markets, and Asset and Wealth Management. With the former, we’re clearly a leader. It’s a large-scale business with a leadership position. And then with our asset and wealth management, we are one of the top five or six businesses as an active asset manager, and that business is growing at 10 percent plus. We see a lot of runway to continue to expand and grow that business. And so, overall, we’ve grown the firm, and we’ve changed a bunch of things in terms of how we hold ourselves accountable to invest and grow. That positions the firm very well as we look ahead for the next three to five years.
Eric Kutcher: Tell us what the “OneGS” strategy is—is that what you’re describing?
David Solomon: OneGS, or One Goldman Sachs, is something that’s really become an operating ethos for the firm. It goes back to when this leadership team took over in 2018. We really felt strongly about ensuring the client-centricity of the firm. If you take a long-term approach with clients, build trust and do the right thing, you don’t have to worry about the short term, because good things will happen over time. One of the things we heard a lot was that our product silos were making clients feel they were not getting a unified approach. And so on my first day as CEO, we announced OneGS as a pilot that applied a holistic approach to our 30 largest clients, and holding ourselves accountable to that. We put incentives in place to monitor and improve our market share and wallet share with those clients, and we found that it was very effective, so we expanded the initiative significantly and it became a cultural operating ethos for how we could work together inside the firm.
Next, we launched OneGS 2.0, which focused on working across different businesses in the firm much more seamlessly. We were good at working across banking and markets, but we also needed to do that for asset and wealth management so we could expand on opportunities that breaking down the silos offered. Today we’re on OneGS 3.0, which centers on how we think about processes and the way we operate the firm, especially given our interest in putting AI capability into the firm to create operating efficiencies, further scale businesses, and remake processes. And so this has become a cultural operating ethos in the firm. It’s something that people can understand and rally around.
Eric Kutcher: How do you get an organization to change? What lessons have you learned about how you bring an organization of this size along?
David Solomon: I’m a big believer that it starts at the very top of the firm and getting the broader leadership group to really embrace it. One advantage we have is our partnership culture and our 450 partners. We’ve invested a lot of time in getting their buy-in on strategy and the cultural changes we want. I’m also a big believer in incentives—if you want certain behavior, incentivize certain behavior.
Eric Kutcher: Another thing CEOs have to balance is all the pressures of the short term. While you are a partnership, you went public, and now you have shareholders. How do you manage their expectations in the short term with all the things you have to do to build the enduring institution?
David Solomon: It’s one of the difficult things about leading big organizations. It’s not always easy. In my seven and a half years, I’ve gone through periods where I’ve had to be more short-term focused than I would have liked. I had to make some difficult decisions that I might have not wanted to make. But they were necessary to move forward in the short term even though I had questions about whether they were the right long-term decisions. You try to keep your compass pointing north and strike the balance. By the way, it’s not just shareholders that you have to respond to. It’s employees, former employees, and your board. You’ve got all these constituents that all have a point of view about the direction of the travel.
Eric Kutcher: Let’s turn to AI now. How are you thinking about the role of AI inside of Goldman Sachs, and where are you in this journey?
David Solomon: The first thing is that we see AI as part of a continuum of change that we’ve been doing for decades. These are tools and applications that make our people more productive. That’s no different from giving somebody a pager in 1994 to make them more reachable, or giving them desktop computers in 1985 and Lotus 1-2-3 software. We’re good at getting tools into our people’s hands, and at training them so they can use the tools. And by the way, our people are super smart. So that’s the easy part.
The more exciting but harder part is figuring out how we use AI to remake processes that give us enormous operating efficiency and therefore free up dollars and resources to be invested in other places where we think we can grow. We highlighted six processes that we’re going to start with to try to reimagine in ways that involve much more automation and efficiency, and therefore more productivity, so we can put that efficiency gain back into growth. We’ve been working hard at that for six to 12 months already, and I think we’ll make some progress in 2026. But where we’ll really see the benefits will be in 2027 and 2028 when we’re able to get this embedded into processes and create efficiency that can be reinvested in growth.
Eric Kutcher: Generative and agentic AI especially are remarkably democratized. Everyone has access to it. But so far the impact is hard to measure. As you said, we’re not going to see much measurable impact in 2026, because right now we are really doing the hard work of re-engineering processes, building agents, and then managing change. It’s not a simple thing.
David Solomon: I’m very optimistic about what can be accomplished over the next five to seven years. My guess is it’s going to be slower for everyone than what we would like, but I think we’re going to wake up at some point and see that the progress curve will turn up very, very quickly. There’s just enormous opportunity from AI.
Eric Kutcher: You’re almost eight years into your tenure at this point. Every CEO faces real moments that test conviction. What have been some of the toughest things you’ve had to do?
David Solomon: Just as I started in the role, I inherited a very difficult situation around a transaction in Malaysia. Someone who worked for us was a criminal, and sorting that out was a difficult process. There was the pandemic. Then, in 2022 after Russia invaded Ukraine, our business declined precipitously because we had exposure in Russia. But at the same time, some of the franchise businesses were performing well. Overall we had an extraordinary year in 2021. But there was just a lot of noise internally in the firm during that transition. We had a consumer business bet that wasn’t accelerating the way we wanted. We had to decide whether to double down or pare back. And so you feel these pressures and you adapt.
You’ve always got to stand back and say, “What matters? Are we executing on the things that really matter?” If you do that, you can rise above the noise and make thoughtful decisions. We’ve gotten about 80 percent of the plan we laid out in 2020 right. You’ve just got to be willing to change your mind and adapt to what the facts and circumstances are at any moment in time.
Eric Kutcher: Something I always hear from CEOs is that there’s no way to prepare yourself for the fullness of the job.
David Solomon: Exactly. Also, like you, I advise CEOs—that was my job as an investment banker. And although I knew you can’t really understand what it feels like to be CEO unless you’ve done it, I also felt that I understood CEOs because I worked with them all the time in the context of my job. But what I learned when I became CEO was that I underestimated how different it feels when you actually sit in the seat.
Eric Kutcher: What are some other things you wish you had known when you stepped into the CEO role?
David Solomon: If you feel you might have a problem with someone in an important leadership job, and it’s not working or they’re not the right fit, it’s probably not going to get better. And so making decisions on people when you feel it’s not working is the most important thing. You need great people in the important seats who believe in what you’re trying to collectively do and want to be a part of that team and are aligned. I advise new or prospective CEOs to really own the people decisions and don’t get pushed into things that you don’t think are right. And if you don’t have the right people around you, don’t wait—act.
Eric Kutcher: Last question: What are you looking forward to most as you look into 2026 and beyond in your leadership role and for Goldman Sachs more broadly?
David Solomon: For my role in the firm, I’m really proud of what the leadership team has accomplished. We’re highly aligned. I think the firm is incredibly well positioned. And we’re super excited about what we can accomplish over the next three to five years. It’s a moment in time where the world is set up for a very good environment for our business.
Eric Kutcher: David, you’ve taken us on a journey that should give us all a lot of optimism and hope.
David Solomon: I appreciate your spending the time to have this conversation. Thank you again.
