Just a few months ago, Bank of America's CEO told employees that artificial intelligence wasn't coming for their jobs. By last week, he was crediting AI for helping the bank quietly shrink its workforce to boost profits. That pivot captures a broader shift on Wall Street, where the long-running promise that AI would augment, not replace, workers is being tested against quarterly earnings and instead has led to thousands of job cuts, per the New York Times. Along with BOA, financial players like JPMorgan Chase, Citi, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Wells Fargo booked a combined $47 billion in profit last quarter, up 18%, while reducing head count all together by roughly 15,000.
Executives often talk about "productivity" and "efficiency journeys" rather than layoffs, but they're now rolling out AI to read legal documents, OK the opening of accounts, assess creditworthiness, and handle customer calls—work that used to require people spread all over the country. The North Carolina city of Charlotte, considered the nation's No. 2 financial center behind New York, is already seeing more and more of its banking jobs overtaken by AI, as reported earlier this year by Axios and the Charlotte Observer.
Some bigwigs, like Wells Fargo CEO Charlie Scharf, openly concede AI will mean fewer human workers, per the Times. Others, including Morgan Stanley, insist they won't use the technology to cut jobs. One veteran banking analyst, who recently left TD Bank and wasn't replaced, warned that AI could first fuel a profit boom, then a painful "fortune reversal" of squeezed margins, mass layoffs, and even bank failures. More from Business Insider on the AI regimen for some of our largest financial institutions. Trade publication American Banker, meanwhile, offers caveats to banks seeking to incorporate more AI, noting that some of the tech's weaknesses, including wrong info and so-called hallucinations, "can be lethal" in the banking industry.
,
uBlock 
,
and
Ghostery 
)
