Goldman Sachs has made a big hire from Amazon to lead the bank's artificial intelligence efforts
- Goldman Sachs has hired Charles Elkan, a former machine-learning expert at Amazon, to run the bank's artificial intelligence efforts.
- Elkan will build and lead a "center of excellence to drive machine learning and artificial intelligence strategy and automation," the bank said in an internal memo viewed by Business Insider.
Goldman Sachs has hired a senior employee away from Amazon to run the bank's artificial intelligence efforts.
Charles Elkan has joined Goldman Sachs as a managing director leading the firm's machine learning and AI strategies, according to an internal memo viewed by Business Insider.
Elkan comes from Amazon, where he was responsible for the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Amazon Web Services, according to the memo. He previously led the retailing giant's Seattle-based central machine learning team.
"In this role, Charles will build and lead a center of excellence to drive machine learning and artificial intelligence strategy and automation," Elisha Wiesel, Goldman Sachs' chief information officer, wrote in the memo. "Charles will work in partnership with teams across the firm looking to apply leading techniques in their businesses."
Elkan has also worked in academia. He served as a computer science professor at the University of California at San Diego, a visiting professor at Harvard University, and as a researcher at Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, according to the memo.
Goldman Sachs has been investing heavily in tech in recent years, with Goldman Sachs CFO Marty Chavez once saying that "Goldman is for risk what Google is for search. The bank recently hired Reinaldo Aguiar, a former senior software engineer at Google who focused on the tech giant's search ranking. He will play a key role in building out the bank's Marquee platform.