It’s not looking good for finance bros as another major banker has sung the praises of AI automating their profession.
On Monday, CEO of JPMorgan Jamie Dimon said that the multinational lender would likely hire less traditional bankers in the future, and instead favor bringing in more AI specialists. Out with the pencil pushers, and in with the prompters.
“I think it will reduce our jobs down the road,” Dimon said in a Bloomberg Television interview during the bank’s China Summit. “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 remarks come amid a lot of unrest over how AI will shakeup white collar industries, as tools like Anthropic’s Claude Code and Claude Cowork have received significant hype for their ability to handle types of knowledge work ranging from programming to legal tasks.
He’s also adding to the commotion surrounding some particularly ghoulish-sounding comments made by Standard Chartered CEO Bill Winters, who while discussing plans to fire 8,000 employees this week blithely enthused that the bank was replacing its “lower-value human capital” with AI. Demonstrating the touchiness of the issue, the backlash that the comments sparked was so intense that Winters rushed like a man fearful of mutiny to issue a memo to his employees the next day, claiming that the quote was “out of context.”
Dimon defended his fellow CEO-in-arms — somewhat back-handedly.
“It was an inartful way to say something,” he said of Winters’ comments, per Bloomberg. “I think it will be old jobs. If back-office jobs disappear, we need more front office jobs to cover more clients.”
Make no mistake: Dimon is all for AI automation, believing it will create new roles where old ones get replaced. But he would rather it happen more slowly through natural turnover, though, not by firing people en masse. (How thoughtful.) With an attrition rate of roughly ten percent, or around 30,000 departures per year, he thinks JPMorgan has the ability to retrain staff, reassign workers, or offer them early retirement, per Bloomberg.
“I think it’s incumbent upon us, society, to think through if it happens too fast,” Dimon added.
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