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Tokenmaxxing may have been the shortest-lived corporate try-hard hustle in history, but many of Wall Street’s year-end bonuses still hinge on AI use. Applicants’ AI skills are nearly four times as important in hiring decisions as where they went to college, and a quarter of US financial firms have tied raises, promotions, and bonuses to AI proficiency, according to a survey of 500 companies by financial recruiting firm Selby Jennings. Breathe easy, bulge-bracketers: The practice is more common among fintech startups and smaller firms than brand-name banks and trading houses, Jacob Summers, Selby Jennings’ head of tech recruiting, told Semafor. Nearly a third of firms surveyed have created new roles or departments to track AI use, where total token burn is less important than wringing some actual value out of all the token use. (“Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live valuemaxxing,” proclaims an IBM blog post from June.) But in many organizations, monitoring that work falls to managers, turning them into part-time AI accountants.
document fetched 2026-10-15 02:59 · canonical https://semafor.com/article/10/14/2026/a-quarter-of-financial-firms-tie-pay-and-promotions-to-ai-proficiency-survey