JPMorgan Prioritizing AI Hires Over Bankers

JPMorgan Chase’s CEO envisions a day where the bank hires more artificial intelligence experts than 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.”

Paul Uren, JPMorgan’s Asia Pacific head of investment banking, confirmed to Reuters that the firm is in the “early phase” of adopting these tools globally. He noted that these AI tools allow bankers to quickly access and synthesize information, streamline the preparation of content, and engage with more clients more efficiently

As Bloomberg noted, 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.

The transition to AI also extends to cybersecurity. JPMorgan is among a select group of organizations permitted by startup Anthropic to use its Mythos cybersecurity model under the “Project Glasswing” initiative. Mythos is designed to detect decades-old vulnerabilities in software, infrastructure and web browsers.

While this technology helps protect the bank, some experts fear it could also be used to supercharge cyberattacks against the industry’s legacy technology. Other major banks, including Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley, are also testing or using the Mythos model.

In the wake of these developments, 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.

JPMorgan 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.