Tuesday this week, 200 single-family offices gathered for the annual Goldman Sachs Apex Global Family Office Symposium, the one-day gathering at the bank’s headquarters in New York. It is always a hot ticket because, in addition to each other, family offices get to hear from and mingle with sought-after speakers and bank leaders, including Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon.
This year, after attendee “nominations” by bank employees and others (you can nominate yourself) were made and invites were sent, all the spots filled up, and a waiting list formed in a record 48 hours.
Geopolitical conflicts, capital markets, venture capital, private credit and artificial intelligence have all been prominent parts of the conference in recent years, but AI was unavoidable this week. It seemed like a part of every conversation.
“What we're starting to realize in our own operations of the business, and I'll say this in my role running the Ayco business, is that it's less about AI as a separate topic and more about how AI really permeates everything that we do,” said Sara Naison-Tarajano, head of Goldman Sachs Ayco, Goldman’s company-sponsored wealth management business that serves corporate executives, employees at hundreds of businesses, including most of the Fortune 100 companies.
Naison-Tarajano formalized and led Apex, a small group of investment bankers dedicated to serving about 600 family-office clients, for several years before becoming the head of Ayco in March. She continues to work with family-office clients and remains the global head of the Goldman Partner Office.
“There was very clearly a pervasive theme of innovation, AI, and implications of that across portfolios and markets more broadly. And clearly things, from a geopolitical and macro standpoint, that are on people's minds,” Anushka Gupta, head of Goldman Sachs Apex Family Office coverage in the Americas, told Modus.
For bankers and attendees, AI has already changed how many people work and live, and its future impacts are expected to be even more significant. In a recent New York Times essay, Solomon argued that fears of an AI job apocalypse are overblown, but that its disruption can’t be dismissed and, if dramatic, should be addressed by public policy.
The speed of AI’s adoption and the growth of companies, including some planning huge initial public offerings, has also enriched founders, employees and investors.
“There's such significant wealth creation happening based on the innovation cycle we're in, and it's really significant in terms of the ways in which the family offices we work with are thinking about their portfolios, about their goals, about philanthropy, about their objectives holistically,” Gupta said. “That was one thing that was very clear across the board, the scale and the velocity of the innovation and resulting wealth creation relative to what we've seen in previous cycles.”
Because work and life have been suffused with AI, it was clear this week that family-office executives wanted human interaction as much as ever. Apex was a reminder that live events are in high demand.
Offices have always been among the most engaged and intellectually curious clients. “You almost can't hit them with too much content,” at the symposium, Naison-Tarajano said. But they were eager to socialize at events the night before and after the conference.
“People really crave that human connection,” since so much is done online and time is spent on social media, Naison-Tarajano said.
After the symposium on Tuesday, attendees made their way to a reception hosted by Goldman at the Crane Club. There, no one was on their phones (and the Wi-Fi was working, the bankers said).
“The event was supposed to end at 8 p.m. and nobody left," Naison-Tarajano said. “I just think it shows…there are parts of how we work with clients that will very much continue to be, and lead, with that human connection, which I think this conference really represents.”
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I'll be in...
- In Boston with friends this afternoon, after a coffee with a family-office employee in Back Bay.
- Lounging at the pool and dining at Nobu in Las Vegas next week.
- Tribeca on Monday, June 15, for a Family Office Rooftop Happy Hour hosted by Ethic, an $8 billion investment firm that specializes in values-aligned SMAs, and Scott Saslow, CEO of ONE WORLD, his single-family office. If you have an SFO or work at one, you can request to attend here.
- Akron in July.
