Each generation of Wall Street workers learns the same lesson the hard way. The bank you join is rarely the bank you leave. Roles are being rearranged, divisions are being traded, and a career path that looked solid on day one probably isn’t the same one that pays by year 30.
For decades, playing it safe inside a giant like JPMorgan Chase (JPM) was easy. Read products, build a business letter, climb the ladder. The big bankers who shepherded clients through deals, financing, and downgrades were the ones who were promoted, paid, and protected when the cycle turned.
That model still works. But it’s being quietly rewritten in real time, and the man driving the rewrite has spent the last few years warning anyone who will listen that the next decade in finance will be nothing like the last.
Now Jamie Dimon has clarified what he means. JPMorgan’s chief executive told Bloomberg Television that the bank will hire artificial intelligence experts and fewer traditional bankers in certain areas as automation accelerates on Wall Street.
Jamie Dimon said JPMorgan plans to reduce headcountshift employment
Speaking at JPMorgan’s China Conference in Shanghai on May 21, Dimon was specific about where the figure would go next.
“I think it will reduce our jobs on the road,” he said in an interview, according to Bloomberg.
“There’s going to be all kinds of different jobs, and I think we’re going to hire a lot of AI people and a lot of bankers in certain fields, and it’s going to make them more productive,” Dimon added.
Additional AI:
Dimon’s outline is important. He’s not talking about the sudden wave of pink slips. He talks about a steady restructuring of who gets work in the first place, while existing workers are retrained, redeployed, or pushed into early retirement.
JPMorgan’s annual decline works out to about 10%, or about 25,000 to 30,000 workers a year, giving leadership real room to change the mix without major layoffs, Bloomberg reported.
Looking at what JPMorgan has been quietly building over the past 18 months, the math behind Dimon’s comments becomes clear. The bank’s technology budget sits close to $20 billion, with about $2 billion of that earmarked for AI, Fast Company reported. JPMorgan has also started tracking and ranking its engineers on internal dashboards based on how they use AI tools.
That’s not a bank trying to manage AI on the side. That is the bank that is rebuilding its operating model around it.
Jamie Dimon tells Bloomberg AI will cut firms’ jobs down the road. Photo by Bloomberg on Getty Images
Why JPMorgan is refocusing its hiring around AI
Dimon is not the only Wall Street boss to make this call. He’s just the loudest.
Wells Fargo (WFC) CEO Charlie Scharf said in December that the bank expects fewer workers in 2026 than in 2025, with AI cited as a major reason.
Related: JP Morgan’s CEO has a strong message for stock investors
Generative AI tools have already made the bank’s engineering teams “30% to 35% more efficient in terms of writing code today,” Scharf said, according to Reuters.
Across emerging markets, Standard Chartered CEO Bill Winters was even more blunt, telling employees the bank is replacing “low-value people” with technology and eliminating 8,000 support roles over the next four years, Bloomberg reported.
A few data points stand out when I put them together:
JPMorgan Chase: 318,153 workers as of September 2025, with annual layoffs of about 25,000 to 30,000, Bloomberg notes.
Wells Fargo: 275,000 workers in 2019 down to about 210,000 by September 30, 2025, according to Reuters.
Standard Chartered: 8,000 support roles scheduled to be cut over the next four years, Bloomberg confirmed.
The six largest US banks: Grossed $47 billion in the most recent quarter, up 18%, while shedding 15,000 employees overall, Entrepreneur reports.
International banks: Up to 200,000 jobs are at risk in the next three to five years, according to Bloomberg Intelligence.
Tomasz Noetzel, a senior analyst who wrote the report for Bloomberg Intelligence, told Bloomberg that “any jobs that involve routine, repetitive jobs are at risk,” adding that AI “will not completely eliminate it, rather it will lead to the transformation of the workforce.”
That’s a polite version of Dimon’s same point.
What the AI revolution means for your money
For consumer-investors, the AI banking story is two-sided, and pulls in different directions.
On the equity side, Bloomberg Intelligence predicts that AI could increase banking pre-tax profits by 12% to 17% by 2027, adding up to $180 billion to the sector’s total base. Eight out of 10 executives surveyed expect productive AI to increase productivity and profits by at least 5% over the next three to five years, according to Bloomberg.
In plain English, that’s a strong windfall of the same megabank stocks held by every major S&P 500 index fund and most retirement portfolios. The earning power inside your 401(k) is being quietly taxed by what happens to the people on these bank payrolls.
On the domestic side, the picture is not so comforting. Citi previously found that about 54% of banking roles have a high probability of AI migration, the highest exposure of any sector studied, noted a Bloomberg Intelligence report.
What stood out to me when I listed those numbers was the speed. Wells Fargo alone has cut about 65,000 jobs in six years. The country’s six biggest banks shed 15,000 jobs in the most recent quarter as they booked record profits.
The squeeze was real before productivity AI hit the desks of Wall Street. Now it’s accelerating, the kind of shift TheStreet has been tracking within a broader cycle of perpetual layoffs.
If you bank with one of these giants, expect fewer people on the phone, more chatbots, automated underwriting decisions, and fast but non-negotiable customer interactions. If you work in financial services, the safest seats seem to be those tied to customer relations, judgment calls, and direct revenue generation, not those tied to repetitive middle office tasks.
Dimon’s message in Shanghai wasn’t really about layoffs. It was about the recruitment filter. Going forward, JPMorgan is looking for people who can build, deploy, and oversee AI in addition to people who can run existing processes.
For shareholders, that’s probably good news for margins. For ambitious small banks looking at the next 10 years inside the Wall Street giant, it’s a quiet reminder. The safest job in 2026 may not be the one chosen by their predecessors. It might be the one that wasn’t there three years ago.
Related: JP Morgan’s CEO has a blunt message on inflation
This story was originally published by TheStreet on May 23, 2026, where it appeared first in the Employment category. Add TheStreet as a favorite source by clicking here.
