JPMorgan Prioritizing AI Hires Over Bankers

“I think it will reduce our jobs down the road,” Jamie Dimon said in an interview with Bloomberg Television Thursday (May 21) at the bank’s China Summit in Shanghai. “There will be all different types of jobs, and I think we will be hiring more AI people and fewer bankers in certain categories, and it will make them more productive.”

As Bloomberg notes, Dimon’s remarks highlight a larger shift in the financial world towards automation, though his tone was more measured than the one taken by other banking CEOs.

For example, Standard Chartered CEO Bill Winters this week sparked backlash when he said the bank is replacing “lower-value human capital” with technology to eliminate 8,000 support roles by the end of the decade. He later apologized for his phrasing.

Goldman Sachs President John Waldron has described traditional back-office operations as a “human assembly line” that is a target for automation, while HSBC CEO Georges Elhedery has warned that AI will “destroy” certain jobs while creating others, and called on employees to adapt to the technology.

In the wake of these remarks, Singapore Deputy Prime Minister Gan Kim Yong on Wednesday (May 20) called on banks to use AI to create better jobs and train workers for better roles.

According to Bloomberg, Dimon argued that the pivot to AI can happen through normal turnover rather than mass job cuts. Dimon added that AI will also create new jobs, especially in client-facing areas.

J.P. Morgan has a yearly attrition rate of around 10%, or about 25,000 to 30,000 departures per year, and thus has the flexibility to retrain or redeploy workers, or offer early retirement packages, the CEO said.

Meanwhile, recent PYMNTS Intelligence research finds that many U.S. companies have a lot of work to do when it comes to training their staff to use AI.

The “Wage to Wallet Index – The Resilience Deficit: Labor Workers in an Automated Economy” report shows that half of all American workers in salaried or higher-paying positions had received no on-the-job training on how to use AI tools, new technologies or automated processes in their jobs in the prior 12 months.

“College graduates know how to use ChatGPT to write essays and Google Gemini’s Nano Banana to generate images and edit photos, but too few workers are getting too little guidance on how to use the technological tools increasingly penetrating the workplace,” PYMNTS wrote.