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Investment Banking in the Age of A.I.

Jon O’Herron, one of Lazard’s legendary partners, used to tell me that all you needed as an investment banker was “a yellow sheet of paper and a pencil.” Obviously, those days are long gone. Rogo, which just raised a new round, heralds a new dawn on Wall Street.

wall street markets AI
Rogo can do in minutes what a junior banker would normally do in one long, sleep-deprived week: spit out company profiles in a nanosecond, take financial data from a variety of sources and put together any number of different comparative analyses, etcetera. Photo: Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
William D. Cohan
January 26, 2025

Back in August 2019, a young man named Gabe Stengel was visiting his friend Theo Jacobs in the Hamptons. Yes, yes, it’s all very collegial: Stengel happens to be the son of my friend Rick Stengel, the former Time editor, Snap advisor, and State Department undersecretary. Jacobs is the son of Ken Jacobs, then the C.E.O. of Lazard, my former firm. Anyway, Gabe was fresh off a quant trading summer internship between his junior and senior years at Princeton when he serendipitously ran into Peter Orszag, the former Obama-era budget director who had joined Lazard in May 2016 as a vice chairman of investment banking. They got to talking.