Jamie Dimon has stuck to his trademark bluntness when talking about AI and jobs.
“It will eliminate jobs,” Dimon said at a Fortune conference in December. “People should stop sticking their heads in the sand.”
In the near term, Dimon said in an interview with CNN that JPMorgan’s head count remains steady, or even rises, as AI continues to roll out — if the bank does a “good job.”
The bigger promise is efficiency. “It will affect every job,” Dimon said at a 2024 Alliance Bernstein conference, describing a future where AI handles tasks like note-taking and summarization at the push of a button.
That efficiency could still mean more hiring in areas like cybersecurity, where Dimon says banks will need AI to counter increasingly sophisticated fraud.
CFO Jeremy Barnum said during the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call on Tuesday that the bank is allowing for some additional hiring in technology “at the margin.”
On that same call, however, Barnum said that, generally speaking, they “want to make sure that when someone needs to get something done, whether it’s in technology or elsewhere, their first reaction is not, ‘Hire more people.'”
He has previously said JPMorgan is asking people to “resist head count growth where possible” and focus instead on efficiency.
The head of JPMorgan’s consumer business, Marianne Lake, has said operations staff could be 40% to 50% more productive over the next five years — a shift she said would lead to slower net head count growth, as each employee can handle far more work through automation, digital assistants, and self-service tools.
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