Here's what Wall Street bank CEOs are saying about head count in the age of AI
AP
- Bank CEOs have praised the pivotal efficiency changes promised by AI.
- Some have said AI will cut jobs, and others say it will create more employment opportunities.
- We look at the public record to see what banking's top executives are saying about head count.
As banks reported earnings this week, CEOs dropped more insight into how generative AI could boost productivity, replace some roles, and keep head count from growing.
Banks, many of which became bloated during the frenzied deal boom of the pandemic, have been slimming down their ranks over the last few years. It's becoming clearer that, despite dealmaking making a comeback, executives are signaling they want to do more with fewer people, leaning on AI to boost productivity and absorb additional work.
We've highlighted some of the most revealing comments from bank CEOs and CFOs on head count and AI.
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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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David Solomon's most definitive statement about how AI will affect Goldman came in a memo he released in 2025 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, said that AI will drive efficiency at the firm, which will mean slowing hiring and reducing roles. (Goldman, with its yearly culling of some employees, is no stranger to job cuts.)
"We will constrain head count growth through the end of the year, in addition to a limited reduction in roles across the firm," the memo read. "These targeted steps are consistent with our priorities of gaining more agility and creating the right team structures in order to implement effective AI solutions."
During the bank's fourth-quarter earnings call Thursday, Solomon said that the firm plans to use AI to both cut costs and "free up capacity to invest in other areas."
Slowing hiring and increasing head count don't need to be contradictory; instead, Solomon has said the firm is focusing its hiring on the right talent.
"We need more high-value people," he told Axios in October. "We can afford more high-value people to expand our footprint and continue to grow and broaden our business."
He has said he 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 in 2025, noting that AI will have its most immediate impact on software development.
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Citi is in the midst of a multi-year turnaround led by the bank's CEO, Jane Fraser, to save roughly $2.5 billion and cut around 20,000 jobs.
In a memo sent to Citi's more than 200,000 employees on Wednesday, Fraser said she will "expect to see the last vestiges of old, bad habits fall away, and a more disciplined, more confident, winning Citi fully emerge in 2026."
Fraser said in the memo that, with AI and automation, some jobs will change, some will emerge, and "others will no longer be required."
During a media briefing ahead of the firm's fourth-quarter earnings call, Mark Mason, the outgoing CFO, said he expects head count to continue trending down "as we continue to improve productivity and tools like AI."
Fraser has previously explained how AI was already increasing productivity.
"AI-driven automated code reviews have exceeded 1 million so far this year and are dramatically improving our developers' productivity," she said during the bank's 2025 third-quarter earnings call. "This innovation alone saves considerable time and creates around 100,000 hours of weekly capacity."
The CEO also highlighted how AI is helping Citi's customer service teams resolve client inquiries faster, its wealth advisors provide more personalized advice, and the firm's plan to launch an agent-based AI pilot to tackle more complex tasks.
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Wells Fargo has already shrunk its head count more than 25% since the second quarter of 2020, CEO Charles Scharf said during the company's fourth-quarter earnings call on Wednesday. He said that efficiency remains an "ongoing focus" for Wells Fargo.
In November, he told Reuters that the bank will likely "have less head count as we look forward." He said the lower head count 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 an asset cap of $1.95 trillion, 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.
Following up on those comments in early December, Scharf clarified that most people know head count will dip, "but they're afraid to say it, because no one wants to stand up and say that we should have — we're going to have lower head count in the future. It's a difficult thing to say."
He said that generative AI tools have already made Wells Fargo's engineers 30% to 35% more productive. While the bank hasn't cut coding jobs yet, the technology will eventually allow it to do more with fewer people across various functions, including compliance and legal, as well as call centers and even banking teams.
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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 2025 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."
On the company's fourth-quarter earnings call in January, Moynihan teased how AI might make some tasks obsolete, though, saying that the bank has 18,000 people on the payroll who code.
"Using the AI techniques, we've taken 30% out of the coding part of the stream of introducing a new product," he said. "That saves us about 2,000 people. So that's how we're applying it."
At the Goldman financial services conference in 2025, Moynihan said the bank is managing flat overall staffing levels by redeploying employees rather than hiring more, with AI playing a central role in absorbing the additional workload. He pointed to Erica, Bank of America's consumer-facing AI assistant, as a clear example of how that is playing out in practice.
In November, Moynihan said that the bank had 1.4 billion digital connections with its customers: "We think it saves, today, about 11,000 FT equivalents."
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Morgan Stanley CEO Ted Pick didn't explicitly address how AI is impacting head count during the bank's fourth-quarter earnings call, but said "there is no more time to waste" when it comes to the technology.
The firm's CFO, Sharon Yeshaya, mentioned a specific operations example where the firm has outsourced some work to AI: "We used to have two teams necessarily checking each other on different documentation to make sure things are right. We now have one human team and one AI team."