Global bank CEOs forecast AI-driven job cuts and workforce shifts
NEW YORK, UNITED STATES — Top executives from major banks delivered a stark consensus: artificial intelligence (AI) will dramatically boost efficiency and suppress headcount growth across the industry, even as some roles are created or transformed, Business Insider reports.
Leaders from JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Citi, Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley, and Bank of America detailed how AI is already being deployed to reduce labor needs, with several stating bluntly that overall employee numbers will decline.
“It’s becoming clearer that, despite dealmaking making a comeback, executives are signaling they want to do more with fewer people, leaning on AI to boost productivity and absorb additional work,” Business Insider notes.
Strategic headcount reduction and efficiency gains
This is presented not as a distant forecast but as a current operational strategy. Jamie Dimon, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of JPMorgan, told Fox Business, “It will eliminate jobs,” while Goldman Sachs’s CEO, David Solomon, in a 2025 company memo, explicitly linked AI to slowing hiring and reducing roles.
“These targeted steps are consistent with our priorities of gaining more agility and creating the right team structures in order to implement effective AI solutions,” the memo stated.
Wells Fargo’s CEO, Charles Scharf, was most direct, calling those who deny that AI will reduce jobs ignorant or dishonest. He said in an interview, “It’s likely we’ll have less headcount as we look forward. We’d like to do much of it through attrition as possible.”
“The opportunities that exist in AI are very significant, and anyone who sits here today and says that they don’t think they’ll have less headcount because of AI either doesn’t know what they’re talking about or is just not being totally honest about it,” Scharf stressed.
This focus on efficiency is already yielding measurable productivity gains that executives believe will curb net employment growth. JPMorgan’s Head of Consumer Business, Marianne Lake, projected operations staff could become 40% to 50% more productive within five years, leading to slower headcount growth.
Concrete examples abound: Citi’s CEO, Jane Fraser, noted AI-driven code reviews created 100,000 hours of weekly capacity, and Wells Fargo’s engineers are already 30% to 35% more productive. “AI-driven automated code reviews have exceeded 1 million so far this year and are dramatically improving our developers’ productivity,” she said.
Bank of America’s Brian Moynihan said using AI saved the equivalent of 2,000 coding jobs in product development. As he notes, “Using the AI techniques, we’ve taken 30% out of the coding part of the stream of introducing a new product.”
Workforce transformation: From job cuts to upskilling
Despite the clear headcount pressure, CEOs articulate a more complex future where AI transforms the nature of work, demanding new skills and creating capacity for strategic growth. They emphasize that while some functions will shrink, investment will shift toward high-value and emerging roles.
Dimon noted that AI efficiency could lead to more hiring in areas such as cybersecurity to combat fraud, and Solomon told Axios that “we can afford more high-value people to expand our footprint and continue to grow and broaden our business” to expand the business, believing AI will increase headcount over the next decade.
The envisioned path forward hinges on retraining and redeploying existing talent rather than purely cutting it. Moynihan emphasized that “the key to that is really redeploying people and re-skilling them.”
“We have to be more mindful about training them along multiple dimensions than we might have been two or three years ago.”
This involves absorbing redeployed employees, as seen at Bank of America, where AI assistant Erica handles interactions, saving an estimated 11,000 full-time equivalents and allowing the bank to manage flat overall staffing.
Similarly, Morgan Stanley’s CFO, Sharon Yeshaya, cites, “We used to have two teams necessarily checking each other on different documentation to make sure things are right. We now have one human team and one AI team.”
Thus, the banking sector’s aggressive pivot toward AI heralds a pivotal test for the modern labor economy: achieving unprecedented efficiency through workforce reduction while simultaneously reinventing, rather than merely replacing, the human roles that will define the industry’s future.
