(May 21): JPMorgan Chase & Co chief executive officer Jamie Dimon said the Wall Street giant will likely hire more artificial intelligence (AI) specialists and fewer traditional bankers as the adoption of the technology accelerates.
“I think it will reduce our jobs down the road,” Dimon said in a Bloomberg Television interview 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.”
Dimon’s comments underscore a broader industry pivot towards automation that is reshaping the global financial workforce. As AI spreads across Wall Street, lenders are racing to boost productivity and streamline operations while navigating the potential political and social backlash triggered by job cuts.
Unlike some of his banking peers, Dimon struck a measured tone, arguing that the AI-driven transition can largely be managed through natural turnover rather than sweeping lay-offs. Even as AI alters every tier of employment, moving beyond back-office tasks into higher-value functions, Dimon said it will also create new roles, particularly in client-facing areas.
With an annual attrition rate of roughly 10%, or about 25,000 to 30,000 departures a year, JPMorgan has the flexibility to retrain staff, redeploy workers, or offer early retirement packages, Dimon said.
Earlier this week, Standard Chartered plc CEO Bill Winters sparked debate by stating the emerging markets lender is replacing “lower-value human capital” with technology to eliminate 8,000 support roles over the next four years. That followed remarks from Goldman Sachs Group Inc president John Waldron, who recently described traditional back-office operations as a “human assembly line” ripe for automation.
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HSBC Holdings plc CEO Georges Elhedery also weighed in this week, warning that AI will “destroy” certain roles while creating others, and urged employees to adapt to the technological shift rather than resist it.
The structural shift is backed by industry data. Roughly 30% of work hours in finance and insurance could be automated by 2030, according to estimates by McKinsey & Co. Meanwhile, research from Citigroup Inc indicates that more than half of all banking jobs have a high potential to be replaced or augmented by technology.
Dimon on Thursday defended Winters, whom he described as a friend.
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“It was an inartful way to say something,” he said. “I think it will be old jobs. If back-office jobs disappear, we need more front office jobs to cover more clients.”
But he also sounded a warning if the transition isn’t handled with care. “I think it’s incumbent upon us, society, to think through if it happens too fast,” he said.
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