Here’s what big bank CEOs have said about AI’s impact on head count

Jamie Dimon's penchant for straight talk means that Dimon is willing to admit that job cuts are coming.

"It will eliminate jobs," Dimon said at a Fortune-hosted conference earlier this month. "People should stop sticking their heads in the sand."

The comments echoed those Dimon made at a town hall for the firm's employees in Columbus, Ohio, earlier this year, where he said that AI will "change some of your jobs," whether as a "copilot," a solution for "drudgery," or by eliminating them.

More immediately for JPMorgan, according to an interview on CNN earlier this month, Dimon sees head count remaining steady, or even rising, as AI continues to roll out, "if we do a good job."

Core to JPMorgan's promise is increased efficiency, which Dimon explored during the 2024 Alliance Bernstein conference.

"It will affect every job, every application, every database, and it will make people highly more efficient," Dimon said. "Like a lot of you clicking away, taking notes. You won't have to do that because it will — you can just summarize what Jamie said. You push a button, and you don't have to waste all that time."

He also explained how increased efficiency could also create more jobs in cybersecurity.

"We use it for risk and fraud recognition, and bad guys are going to use it," Dimon said. "So, we have to use it to counter the bad guys. We have to use it to get better and better in cyber."

Other executives at the firm are even more explicit about how headcount at the firm is changing now.

In operations, the "tip of the spear" on using this new technology, executives expect head count to trend down 10% through 2029, according to Marianne Lake, the CEO of consumer and community banking.

Jeremy Barnum, the firm's CFO, said they're "asking people to resist head count growth where possible and increase their focus on efficiency."

While a more efficient future with an equal number of working and non-working weekdays may exist in the coming decades, according to Dimon, for now, hiring may slow.

David Solomon's most definitive statement about how AI will affect Goldman actually came from a memo he released earlier this year alongside the firm's president John Waldron and CFO Denis Coleman.

The memo, announcing the third iteration of the bank's cross-bank initiative OneGS, explains that AI will drive efficiency at the firm. Driving efficiency will mean slowing hiring and reducing roles at the firm, which is no stranger to job cuts, with a yearly culling of some employees.

"We're asking people to resist head count growth where possible and increase their focus on efficiency," the memo said. This will be part of a broader initiative to find the "right team structure" and to gain "more agility."

When Business Insider obtained the memo and reported on it, a spokesperson for the bank told us that the firm anticipates an increased head count at the end of 2025, and in the third quarter of 2025, it announced it had grown its global workforce 5% to about 48,000 positions.

Slowing hiring and increasing head count don't need to be contradictory; instead, the firm is focusing its hiring on the right talent.

"We need more high-value people," Solomon told Axios in October. "We can afford more high-value people to expand our footprint and continue to grow and broaden our business."

Solomon continues to believe that AI will grow the firm's head count over the next 10 years.

"There are obviously things where we're going to have a lot fewer people — but I'd love to have the capacity to go get more people to spend time with clients," Solomon said at a conference last month, noting that AI will have its most immediate impact on software development.

Speaking more generally earlier this month, he said that "disruption" will happen, but "our economy is very nimble, very flexible."

"And when you look at the technology that has flooded over hundreds of years into our society, we adapt," Solomon said. "We find new businesses. We find new jobs. I don't believe it will be different this time."

The adoption may come quicker than previous changes, like the creation of the internet or the rollout of electricity. And Solomon shares the views of others that professional workers may take the hardest hit.

"The need for some white-collar office jobs will be diminished, but they'll be picked up in other parts of the economy," said Solomon.

Back in 2023, Jane Fraser wrote a LinkedIn post walking through her big picture thoughts about AI at the bank. She, like her peers at the bulge brackets, saw big-time transformation ahead.

"In the near term, generative AI will drastically improve productivity," she wrote. "Over the long term, it has the potential to revolutionize all functions across our bank and the industry — changing how we write code, onboard clients, service customers, detect fraud, develop market research and strengthen compliance and controls."

On a recent earnings call, Fraser explained how it was already increasing productivity.

"AI-driven automated code reviews have exceeded 1 million so far this year and are dramatically improving our developers' productivity," Fraser said. "This innovation alone saves considerable time and creates around 100,000 hours of weekly capacity."

Fraser also highlighted how AI is helping their customer service teams resolve client inquiries faster, their wealth advisors provide more personalized advice, and the firm is launching an agent-based AI pilot to tackle more complex tasks.

When she was asked by CNBC this month if productivity increases from AI will lead to layoffs, Fraser said her "fear" is that AI might "pinch" the job market "before it pays."

But, with adoption only at 10% globally, she said, it's a long way before adoption is widespread enough to see what it will do for layoffs. Fraser said adoption will need to be closer to 50%.

"It's not there yet, and we don't know how quickly," Fraser said.

Wells Fargo has already shrunk its headcount by nearly a quarter since Charles Scharf joined in 2019, and he expects that trend to continue.

"It's likely we'll have less headcount as we look forward … we'd like to do much of it through attrition as possible," Scharf told Reuters this month.

He said the lower headcount is an "outcome" of the firm's focus on areas where it's "way too inefficient" and "way too bureaucratic." From 2018 to June of this year, the firm had a $1.95 trillion asset cap, hindering its ability to grow.

In the same interview, Scharf called out those who are saying that AI won't reduce jobs.

"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 head count because of AI either doesn't know what they're talking about or is just not being totally honest about it," he said.

Bank of America has set a new industry standard, with a minimum wage of $25 an hour across the company. And while CEO Brian Moynihan conceded on a September Bloomberg TV interview that generative AI adoption has shrunk the size of some departments, the bank is focusing on training employees to do what LLMs cannot.

"The key to that is really redeploying people and re-skilling them," he said. "We have to be more mindful about training them along multiple dimensions than we might have been two or three years ago."