Wall Street banks are racing to deploy artificial intelligence across a growing range of operations, using AI agents to accelerate loan underwriting, generate drafts of regulatory filings, review back-end code, and produce deal presentations — but executives are struggling with how to manage the workforce implications and preserve the traditional path to developing top dealmakers.
“We’re very actively thinking about: How do we retrain? How do we get ahead of that?” Wells Fargo CEO Charlie Scharf said at a recent industry conference.
The productivity gains are driving rapid adoption, but banks face a looming mismatch between their current staffing and future talent needs. The tension is especially acute in investment-banking divisions, where junior analysts traditionally perform rote modeling tasks — the apprenticeship that produces future rainmakers — and now increasingly use AI for that work.
Citigroup has joined with Alphabet’s Google to develop an AI-powered agent for wealth management clients. Andy Sieg, head of wealth at Citi, said the role of AI is “to supercharge” the abilities of advisers. “There’s fear out there in the marketplace around AI,” Sieg said, but he said the agent would supplement, not replace, human advisers.
In investment banking, JPMorgan Chase and Citi are among the banks using Felix, an AI agent developed by the startup Rogo. Rogo CEO Gabriel Stengel said that, within 25 minutes, Felix created a first pass on a 24-page presentation for a deal to take a company private.
“Normally that would have taken days,” Stengel said.
Stengel said he believes AI tools will ultimately encourage banks to hire more rank-and-file staff while pushing down the cost of delivering financial services to clients.
Clients are already adjusting their expectations, according to some investment bankers. Clients familiar with AI now expect bankers to produce slide decks, financial models, and other materials more quickly. Some clients are using AI themselves to generate more technical questions and to compare pitches from different banks. The resulting efficiency may push down the fees banks charge.
More than two-thirds of banking executives surveyed by IntraFi, which provides deposit services to banks, said they expect AI to have little impact on overall staffing levels at their banks in the next three years. About a quarter expect to reduce staffing somewhat, while 3% anticipate increasing staffing.
Not all banks are holding back on cuts. Standard Chartered said it would likely eliminate more than 15% of back-office roles over the next four years because of AI. CEO Bill Winters later apologized for describing the technology as something that would replace “lower value human capital.”
Bilal Hafeez, head of strategy and AI at Macro Hive, a financial research and AI analytics platform, said the shift will alter hiring patterns. “AI means there will be less of a need to hire for traditional finance roles in the long run,” he said. “It’s kind of a mindset shift.” He said banks will need more workers who can build, test, and monitor AI models.
At JPMorgan Chase, CEO Jamie Dimon said earlier this year that AI has already displaced some employees, but that the bank has offered those workers other roles. Dimon has more recently acknowledged broader changes ahead. “Certain things won’t change. I tell people you have to move money, raise money, send money, manage money,” Dimon told investors last month. “But everything else can change.”
Broader technology-sector layoffs tied to AI have accelerated this year. Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg called AI “the most consequential technology of our lifetimes” in a memo citing the company’s decision to trim thousands of employees. As reported earlier this year, companies from Cisco to Meta have cited AI as a factor in layoffs, and economists have warned of underemployment and potential unrest even as AI drives GDP growth.