What Financial institution CEOs Are Saying AI Will Do to Their Head Counts

Jamie Dimon has caught to his trademark bluntness when speaking about AI and jobs.

“It is going to remove jobs,” Dimon stated at a Fortune convention in December. “Individuals ought to cease sticking their heads within the sand.”

Within the close to time period, Dimon stated in an interview with CNN that JPMorgan’s head rely stays regular, and even rises, as AI continues to roll out — if the financial institution does a “good job.”

The larger promise is effectivity. “It is going to have an effect on each job,” Dimon stated at a 2024 Alliance Bernstein convention, describing a future the place AI handles duties like note-taking and summarization on the push of a button.

That effectivity might nonetheless imply extra hiring in areas like cybersecurity, the place Dimon says banks will want AI to counter more and more refined fraud.

CFO Jeremy Barnum stated through the firm’s fourth-quarter earnings name on Tuesday that the financial institution is permitting for some further hiring in expertise “on the margin.”

On that very same name, nonetheless, Barnum stated that, typically talking, they “need to ensure that when somebody must get one thing achieved, whether or not it is in expertise or elsewhere, their first response just isn’t, ‘Rent extra folks.'”

He has beforehand stated JPMorgan is asking folks to “resist head rely development the place doable” and focus as an alternative on effectivity.

The pinnacle of JPMorgan’s client enterprise, Marianne Lake, has stated operations workers might be 40% to 50% extra productive over the subsequent 5 years — a shift she stated would result in slower internet head rely development, as every worker can deal with way more work by means of automation, digital assistants, and self-service instruments.