How banks like Morgan Stanley and Citi are upskilling their engineers for the AI era

• Banks are working to reskill developers as they race to adopt AI.
• Efforts include capstone-style courses, video modules, and voluntary initiatives, like hackathons.
• Tech leads said English communication with AI agents is key in the new "continuous learning" era.

Not long ago, bank software developers only had to adjust to major technological shifts every few years. Today, those shifts are arriving every other month.

Engineers are in "continuous learning mode" as they race to keep up with the rate of change, Trevor Brosnan, Morgan Stanley's global head of technology strategy, architecture, and modernization, told Business Insider.

Technologists on Wall Street today are often grinding through capstone-style courses, working on basic communication skills, or watching a bunch of YouTube-style videos as many banks help them upskill to keep pace with AI advancements.

"Something you thought you knew about AI three months ago might be out of date by now," Jonathan Lofthouse, the chief information officer at Citi, said.

Banks from JPMorgan to Citi are pouring billions into AI to make their workforces more efficient, deliver better client experiences, and ultimately cut costs. They're also scrambling to recruit the talent needed to bring those strategies to life.

The engineers who do best at these banks will be those who learn how to use AI effectively — and the banks are going to great lengths to help them learn fast, according to Alexandra Mousavizadeh, the cofounder and co-CEO of Evident, which tracks AI use in the financial industry.

And when it comes to recruiting new talent, a willingness to take advantage of the "continuous learning" is crucial.

"We are hiring for potential upskilling," Nish Rana, the senior director of Enterprise Data at Capital One, said of his hiring for the bank's AI and machine learning capabilities. Business Insider spoke with technology leaders at Citi, Morgan Stanley, and Capital One about their strategies for upskilling their engineering ranks. Citi and Morgan Stanley respectively employ 30,000 and 15,000 developers, and Capital One has around 15,000 engineers.

"It's a lot of time spent now on helping accelerate developers' adoption, so that they can become more aware of these and give back some of their capacity," Dov Katz, a distinguished engineer at Morgan Stanley, said.

Communication is key

One key part of that upskilling involves learning how to talk to agents, much as they would with another engineer.

Developers need to communicate with the newest generation of generative AI tools in English, not in code, "and not everybody in technology has a reputation for being an excellent communicator," Katz said. As Citi's Lofthouse put it, most developers' second language is Java.

"And actually, Java is sometimes a bit easier to express problems in than a first language," he said, especially when it comes to describing the complexities of the financial markets.

It's important to give an AI agent as much guidance as possible on the task to perform and the desired output, said Brosnan.

"That is a shift from, 'Okay, I'm the person writing all the code, but have a little assistance,' to now, I'm giving much bigger tasks and delegating them to an agent," Brosnan said. Everyone he works with is learning that skill in real time to use the tools most effectively. It is, he said, a "fundamental shift" in what it means to work as a developer.

That's not to say that coding is irrelevant — all of the technology leads said it's still important to know foundational coding languages, especially since humans have to check all of the code that AI agents write.

Banks are creating in-house AI courses

Capital One has developed its own AI Academies, Rana said, which are "considered a one-stop solution to grasping fundamentals, all the way up to advanced learning." The courses cover tech initiatives within the bank, including AI/ML Foundations, ML Modeling, and Research & Prototyping.

"New engineers who are coming into our company don't necessarily need to have an extensive background," Rana said. "We have formal training that can bring them up to speed in a very consolidated and accelerated way."

Morgan Stanley also offers a mix of outsourced and in-house courses, and Citi recently ran a "Techflix" series, where anyone on the technology and business enablement team could watch videos and participate in associated challenges, some of which related to AI.

Each of the banks Business Insider spoke to said they offer engineers video modules to master emerging AI skills. Brosnan said they can be as short as five minutes. He added that many employees learn a lot from YouTube, whether for work or personal interests, and that videos have proven to be a powerful tool.

Older educational efforts continue

Beyond their AI-specific upskilling efforts, the banks Business Insider spoke with have continued with older programs, like hackathons and technology all-hands meetings. Opt-in programs are hugely popular, Brosnan and Lofthouse said, and have proven to be crucial educational architecture as the pace of learning continues to accelerate.

Learning opportunities aside, the rate of change is a source of anxiety for many engineers, as some worry the shine of a computer science degree is fading in a world where bots can spit out code at record speed. Yet the tech leaders said that AI will ultimately let their engineers, equipped with the right skills, focus on higher-order thinking and higher-impact work.

"There's anxiety about the change, but it's balanced by how exciting it's going to be," Lofthouse said.

Rana said that some veteran engineers are anxious about keeping pace with the rapid shifts in AI.

Everything his team is doing — from AI academies to online videos to tech talks — is aimed at giving engineers not only the tools to succeed, but the "psychological safety net" of learning in a comfortable corporate sandbox.