Goldman Sachs Predicts AI Agents Will Increase Tech Cash Flow

New Goldman Sachs research argues that agentic artificial intelligence will reshape the financial landscape at major tech companies.

A report last week from the Wall Street banking giant argues that the adoption of autonomous AI agents is expected to drive a 24-fold increase in global token consumption by 2030, reaching 120 quadrillion tokens processed per month.

With computing costs decreasing in tandem, AI players are poised for a period of “margin inflection,” said Jim Schneider, the senior equity analyst covering U.S. semiconductor and IT services at Goldman Sachs Research.

“The concern in the generalist investor community is the sustainability of capex because the free cash flows of hyperscalers have been compressed,” Schneider said. “What fixes that? The answer lies in the underlying economics of the problem. If you raise gross margins, you raise operating cash flow, and that gives you more headroom to spend.”

Despite the optimistic long-term outlook, the industry faces bottlenecks. For example, a shortage of high-end semiconductors is expected to last for the next 12 to 18 months as semiconductor makers build new plants to meet shifting demand. Schneider predicts it could take two years for supply to fully catch up with the rapidly evolving use cases.

Adoption will vary, the researcher found. Consumer-facing “smartphone takeover” agents are already emerging in markets like China.

“These things are becoming more autonomous in nature. We are entering a phase of ‘always-on’ background agents that perform tasks when they’re needed,” Schneider said.

But enterprise adoption is expected to take longer due to complex requirements around integration, testing, and compliance.

“The important point is that the adoption rates are still relatively low today, especially in small to medium-sized businesses,” Schneider said.

“In 2030, we forecast that 12% of knowledge workers will be using agentic AI yet by 2040 that figure will be 37%. You have this very long-tail adoption.”

Research by PYMNTS Intelligence has chronicled the long road to enterprise adoption of agentic AI.

Last August, the chief product officers (CPOs) at more than half of companies (52%) surveyed by PYMNTS said they were just “considering” or “exploring” agentic AI. Within a few months, that number had plunged to 30%.

“In other words, a big chunk of the enterprise market moved out of the window-shopping phase,” PYMNTS wrote earlier this year.

“What replaced the passive interest is hands-on implementation. In November, nearly 1 in 4 CPOs reported that they were either piloting agentic AI or fully using it in production processes, up from just 3% in August.”

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