Musk Courts Bankers and Lenders to Teach Grok Finance

xAI reportedly wants its Grok chatbot to get better at offering financial strategies.

To that end, the Elon Musk-led artificial intelligence (AI) startup is hoping to hire bankers and private credit lenders to provide lessons, Bloomberg News reported Monday (March 16), citing job posts on the company website.

The plan is to recruit Wall Street bankers, portfolio managers, traders and credit analysts for its data annotation teams that train the chatbot, the report added. These professionals are expected to help Grok reason through things like leveraged loan syndication and collateralized loan obligations, Bloomberg said.

The report points out that other AI startups, including OpenAI and Anthropic, have already introduced tools for financial analysis. xAI, which recently merged with Musk’s SpaceX, is typically seen as trailing rivals in attracting enterprise clients, the report continued.

The news follows Musk’s recent announcement that he plans to rebuild xAI. News reports from the weekend say this rebuilding could involve layoffs, and that several of the company’s founders have recently stepped down.

Musk last week hired two senior employees from the AI coding startup Cursor, the report said. The multibillionaire recently acknowledged that xAI is lagging on the coding front, an area that has helped drive revenues for Anthropic and OpenAI.

xAI’s effort to train Grok in the ways of finance comes as consumers and businesses are turning to the technology for financial guidance.

For example, research by PYMNTS Intelligence has found that 62% of Gen Z consumers are willing to use AI for “what if” financial planning, which is “a signal that generative AI is shaping their expectations for real-time advice,” as covered here late last year.

Additional research shows that chief financial officers (CFOs) are using agentic AI for a host of reasons, chief among them dynamic budget reallocation based on fresh cost data.

Around 43% of CFOs expect a high impact from using agents in some form to handle this function, with another 47% saying they expect moderate impact.

“Instead of annual or quarterly budget resets, agentic AI can continuously scan real-time spending patterns, flag overruns and shift funds toward higher-priority areas,” PYMNTS wrote last month.

“For CFOs under pressure to do more with what they have, the promised payoff is fewer surprises, fewer fire drills and more discernment and control over how every dollar is deployed.”

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