Goldman Sach Exchanges

AI Exchanges: The Role of Data

Neema Raphael, Chief Data Officer, Head, Data
Engineering, Goldman Sachs
George Lee, Co-Head, Goldman Sachs Global Institute
Allison Nathan, Senior Strategist, Goldman Sachs
Research
Date of recording: September 25, 2025

Allison Nathan: Welcome to Goldman Sachs Exchanges.

I'm Allison Nathan, and I'm here with George Lee, the co-
head of the Goldman Sachs Global Institute. Together,
we're co-hosting a series of episodes exploring the rise of AI
and everything it could mean for companies, investors, and
economies.

George, good to see you again.

George Lee: Great to see you, Allison. Good to be here.

Allison Nathan: So George, we've had several

conversations about how AI is shaping the economic and
business landscape, but today we want to actually get a
little bit more under the hood and talk about the

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technology itself. And in particular, the role that data will
play in enabling or possibly stalling its progress.

We have a terrific guest to dive into these issues with us,

Neema Raphael, the chief data officer and head of Data
Engineering here at Goldman Sachs. Neema, welcome to
AI Exchanges.

Neema Raphael: Thanks for having me. Excited to

be here.

Allison Nathan: So before we dig into the topic at hand,

first just tell us a little bit about how you got here, your
career journey, and what your current role here at
Goldman Sachs entails.

Neema Raphael: Yeah. This is 20-plus years for me

at Goldman. I started right out of college. Studied
Computer Science. And during that, I sort of realized that I
wanted to apply technology to a domain that I had not
known before. And so really finance was sort of like this
black box to me. I came to Goldman, met amazing people,
started as an analyst here, software engineering, you know,
typing at the keyboard, writing code.

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And then really the data thing came I'd say five years in.
Global Financial Crisis, 2008. Lehman Brothers collapses.
And a group of technologists called core strats at the time
was going around the firm saying, "Hey, you know, we have
to figure out what our exposure to Lehman is. We have to
figure out our liquidity profile, see what's going on at
Goldman."

And the way they had structured it was to try to get all of
the data from the front office, middle office, and back office
together in one place to, sort of, figure out the end-to-end
exposure to Lehman in a very technology- and data-heavy
way. And that was sort of, like, the genesis of I'd say my
data journey here.

That project actually was super interesting because we had

heard other banks and other financial institutions actually
have to go into their filing cabinets to dig out their ISDAs
that were signed with Lehman to figure out what their
contracts were. We luckily had a lot of our data sort of
corralled in one place, and actually that database we built,
it was called Copter, ended up becoming this place not only
that people realized, like, the power of data not just being

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sort of like an exhaust but actually an enabler for the
business.

And then not only did people recognize, okay, this database
sort of saved the firm in some interesting way, but then
when we gave that same data to traders, sales people,
strats on the desks, quants on the desks, people started
coming up with new innovative ways to use that data for
helping our clients and just running the firm a lot more
efficiently. And so it became this sort of launching pad for
people outside of technology to say, "Hmm, data maybe can
be a powerful concept here."

George Lee: That's great. And so in your role as chief

data officer now, you oversee all of that. Other things
you've done in your career have been involved with what we
used to call in the dim, dark past machine learning. The
point is AI has been around. We've used it at the firm. It's
been broadly proliferated, but the rise of generative AI has
garnered so much attention. Is it fundamentally different
than the journey we've been on? Or is it just an extension
of the continuum of good old-fashioned AI?

Neema Raphael: Yeah, I think I'd say a little bit of

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both because it feels like some sort of step-change function
from the historical. You know, I always talk about the first
50-60 years of computer science, sitting down and humans
have to code rules to tell the computer what to do. And we
talk about determinism. Like the rules were deterministic.
If you push this button, please do this. Or if you type
these keys, please do that. And so it was this really
fundamental shift I guess in machine learning in general
which is, like, learn by example instead of learn by rules.

And so in some ways, the generative AI stuff is just

continuation of learn by example, but I don't think people
naturally saw it go from, "Hey, I could learn maybe how to
predict some patterns," to now the computer could create
anything. And so there's a little bit of that continuum.
Like, "Hey, if we just feed the machine more and more
examples, more and more data, it could start learning
things," is probably the path of continuum. But the sort of
step-change was, like, "Oh, well, can we feed it and create
images? Create audio? Create language?" And so I think
that's sort of the novel step-change in the generative part.

George Lee: And you illustrated something I think is very

fundamental in terms of company culture in this shift,

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which is we're used to deterministic computing. For a
given input, the outputs are correct, repeatable, and
traceable. We're no longer in that sphere. As you pointed
out, these are probabilistic machines. Something emerges
from it that you can't trace and is often right but not
always.

Talk about the mindset difference inside an organization of

getting business users in particular to be comfortable with
that.

Neema Raphael: I'd say a little bit in finance people

maybe have understood that because of our pricing models
and derivative pricing. I mean, it was also stochastic in
that way anyway. So there was always a little bit of, okay,
like, the world is nondeterministic and so prices are
nondeterministic, the markets are nondeterministic,
economies are nondeterministic. So I think there was
maybe a willingness to sort of understand that here in the
finance world.

But I agree. I think when non-engineers sit at a computer,

they sort of want a thing to be a repeatable pattern. That's
how we build workflows here. That's how we build client

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insights or anything we do here to help our clients.

So I think it's really about teaching people this isn't just

some magic crystal ball, right? What it's really doing is
taking a lot of examples and giving you an extrapolation
from those examples.

Allison Nathan: Let me just ask a follow-up to that,

though, because we've had a lot of conversations on this
podcast about the ultimate potential of the technology.
There's so much hype around it. We're having another, I
think, leg up in the hype in the last month or two here.
Given what you know about the technology, do you think
it's over hyped or maybe even under hyped?

Neema Raphael: Yeah, so as George knows, I'm

always a little bit of a skeptic of new technology.
Historically, we've talked a lot about blockchain and things
like that. And that was supposed to revolutionize, and it
was the next thing to revolutionize. And look, I think from
an AI perspective, it's obvious that it's real. It's here to
stay. There is absolutely a hype to it.

But also, when you go on your phone and you ask Claude,

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Gemini, GPT, take a picture and you ask, like, "What is
this?" Or you ask, "Give me some research on a topic I'm
curious about," and you get great answers and you
research more, it's definitely, definitely real in the sort of
consumer world I think.

I think where the hype -- I don't know. I would say it

slightly differently than "hype." I'd say the potential I think
in the enterprise is still to be seen. I think there's some
really slam-dunk use cases we've seen, right? Like, agent
coding, for example, is a thing that sort of flipped my brain
from "this might be vaporware" to, like, "wow, this is, like,
really real." When I sat down at the computer and I was,
like, coding with an agent and it was helping me with
problems that I've never been able to solve before, I was,
like, wow, this is incredibly powerful as a superhuman
ability, you know, like, amplifying my abilities. So I think
there's definitely real there.

I think from an enterprise perspective, the thing to be seen

is where can people harness their data and their enterprise
data and the proprietary data they have to make some
differentiation in the enterprise space? That's the "to be
seen" part.

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Allison Nathan: But we're only a couple of years into this
newer generation of these models. Do you foresee a future
where we actually do, though, run out of data? I mean,
we're early here, but is that ahead?

Neema Raphael: I would frame it a different way.

We've already run out of data. We've already run out of
data. When you read about the new models, the undertone
of what people say -- and you've seen this in, like, the
DeepSeek moment and things like that -- is, like, everyone
wonders how did they do that with less money? One of the
big hypotheses is they trained against another model,
right? So it already incorporated the previous thing.

I think the real interesting thing is going to be how

previous models then shape what the next iteration of the
world is going to look like in this way.

Allison Nathan: So let me reframe my question, which is

more that do you think this is going to restrain the
potential of the technology?

Neema Raphael: No, I don't think so. The explosive

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nature of the synthetic data and the fact that now the
computer can generate infinite amount of more data, again,
I think there'll be a sort of a cursor of what people call, like,
“AI slop” versus maybe more insightful data. But I don't
think it's going to be a massive constraint only because a
lot of trapped enterprise data still has not been harnessed.
And I think you see that in the work that we're doing at
Goldman.

For example, like, we want to help our sales people, our

traders, our quants, our PMs to, sort of, again, get that
superhuman capability, that information synthesis, being
able to help with their hypothesis. And there's still a lot of
data here at Goldman that could be used for that. So I
think from a consumer world model, I think it's interesting
we've definitely in the synthetic sort of explosion of data.
But from an enterprise perspective, I think there's still a lot
of juice I'd say to be squeezed in that.

George Lee: Yeah, I would echo that. I think these

machines have come an enormous distance in their quality,
and they've done it largely on the back of publicly available
and synthetically generated data. The amount of data that
lives behind firewalls, trapped inside corporate repositories

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that's highly salient to garnering business value, that has
yet to be unlocked. It's the work that Neema is doing here.

Then there are also other horizons. Think about all the
video data in the world. Think about spinning up virtual
environments where you're creating a platform for virtual
robots to generate their own data about understanding the
world. I think while we've exhausted one pool of data,
there are many others to go attack.

Neema Raphael: I think, to get a little philosophical

out of my realm, but I think what might be interesting is
people might think there might be a creative plateau. I
mean, if all of the data is synthetically generated, right?
Then how much human data could then be incorporated?
New human data, new human intellect, new human
creativity. I think that'll be an interesting thing to watch
from a philosophical perspective.

George Lee: For sure. You know, one or two of our prior
guests have made the observation germane to this
discussion that the quality of outputs from these models,
particularly in enterprise settings, is highly dependent on
the quality of the data that you're sourcing and referencing

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inside the business. Do you agree with that? It kind of
goes to this what's the value of these behind-the-firewall
data stores. Maybe just illustrate a little bit of that, how
we can make models smarter with our own proprietary
data stores.

Neema Raphael: Yeah, I think first again you got to

remember what this thing is doing, what this machine is
doing, right? Whatever data patterns you are feeding this
machine is what it's going to learn and what it's going to
extrapolate from. And so I think from an enterprise value
perspective, cleaning your data, normalizing it, having the
semantics of that data well understood, how it links to
other pieces of data, all of this stuff is what's going to allow
enterprises to level up from what we think the consumers
get to what enterprise value could be created.

Allison Nathan: So what are some things that Goldman

is doing to unlock that value?

Neema Raphael: Yeah, look, I don't think people had

always thought of data as sort of like this thing that could
give more insight to the world. I mean, it's always
historically been thought of as, like, business exhaust in

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some way, right? Like, a trader executes a trade, they're
sort of like, "Okay, I'm done. Now I'm just managing the
risk." But there's a whole machine behind that about what
happens after that, all the workflows that happen after
that, and before that.

And so the real challenges are getting that disparate data

into some place where you could organize it in a sane way
and then normalize it in ways where the data is correct
when you ask it a question, it's linked to the other facts of
the world when you want to navigate from that fact to
another fact. And so all of these challenges are really, you
know, that's why the role of data engineering was even
created. People were like we need a practice of engineering
that's like software for data. And so just like people write
code in a specific way and there's specific architectures and
engineering practices to that is the same in data. You have
to sort of understand what the data actually means. You
have to understand are these two concepts the same? Are
they linked differently?

And so really the challenge is understanding the data,

understanding the business context of the data, and then
being able to normalize it in a way that makes sense for the

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business to consume it.

Allison Nathan: Can you actually use the models to help

you organize the data?

Neema Raphael: Absolutely.

Allison Nathan: Is there some synergy happening there?

Neema Raphael: Definitely. Like, people have built

software agents, people have built engineering agents to do,
like, this cleansing, this normalization, this linking. So
absolutely in the same way where we're seeing software
being created by these agents, there's also a feedback loop
of data cleansing and normalization and wrangling, so
that's a good insight.

Allison Nathan: Neema, we often close these interviews

by asking our guests how they might actually use AI
themselves. Either we talked a lot about you are using it in
the office, but even personally what do you find is the most
interesting and helpful usage?

Neema Raphael: Yeah, you're asking a tech nerd, so

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obviously the tech nerd to the coding answer is, like, the
base case. But I also have a three-and-a-half-year-old son
and he's in his "why" phase, which is awesome. But I'm
just, like, I run out of, like, the turtles of the "why." And
so, like, actually a lot of times he's like, "What is that?
Why is that?" And actually bouncing ideas off of him with
the agents I think is really cool. And I think it's been
powerful for me.

So now he asks me questions. I ask the AI questions. We

learn together about questions he's curious about. So I
love that.

Allison Nathan: And as he gets older, he's going to be

able to ask himself. So when my teenagers ask me
questions, I say, "Look it up. Use AI. Figure it out."

Neema Raphael: Let me Google it up for you.

Allison Nathan: Exactly.

George Lee: Though part of Neema's genius is he gets to

freeride on the knowledge acquisition of his son.

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Neema Raphael: That's right! Exactly!

George Lee: And be involved. So I love that.

Neema Raphael: Exactly.

Allison Nathan: Well, thanks very much, Neema. That

was a fascinating conversation.

Neema Raphael: Thanks. Thanks for having me.

Allison Nathan: I mean, George, Neema had so much

insight. What really stood out to you the most about the
conversation?

George Lee: Well, as I predicted, you know, grounded,

objective, thoughtful. I agree it was a great discussion.
You know, people sometimes peer pass the data problem.
But as Neema I think illustrated well, it really lies at the
heart of bringing value from these systems in business. So
onward and upward.

Allison Nathan: As always, thanks for the conversation,

George. Always great talking to you.

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George Lee: Thank you. Thank you, Neema.

Neema Raphael: Thank you both. It was awesome to

be here.

Allison Nathan: This episode of Exchanges was recorded

on September 25th, 2025. I'm Allison Nathan.

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