On May 19, Jeremy Barnum, JPMorgan Chase’s CFO, told investors in New York that after years of aggressive hiring practices, the bank will slow down and focus on efficiency by integrating more artificial intelligence (AI) into its operations.
“We’re asking people to resist headcount growth where possible and increase their focus on efficiency,” he said according to Business Insider.
He added that AI will be a primary driver in future operations, possibly resulting in a 10 percent staffing reduction in areas including account services, processing and fraud.
“It should go without saying that we’ll never compromise on safety and soundness and we’ll continue to hire and invest in the high-certainty areas where there is a link between adding employees and growth revenue,” Barnum said.
Marianne Lake, CEO of Consumer and Community Banking at JPMorgan Chase, is more optimistic about AI’s role in operations, stating AI will lead to a larger workforce reduction.
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“I would take the over on this projection and bet that we will deliver more,” she said.
Barnum added that all future hires should be “strategic,” and recruiting should focus on obtaining more bankers and advisors in “high-certainty areas.”
He said that it would be highly unlikely any new hires would be able to work from home, or remotely, a practice the institution’s CEO Jamie Dimon has spoken out against in the past.
“You can’t learn working in your basement,” Dimon once told a crowd at a town hall event.
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A growing trend
JPMorgan Chase joins a growing list of large companies that are pivoting to a more digital workforce, including tech giants Microsoft, IBM, Google and others.
Unsurprisingly, Microsoft is betting big on AI, pouring $80 billion into AI-enabled data centers in 2025 alone and integrating AI across products like Azure, Microsoft 365 Copilot, and Edge.
According to a November 2024 Microsoft blog post, nearly 70 percent of Fortune 500 companies use Microsoft 365 Copilot for tasks like email management; indicating widespread adoption of AI.
Google is just as aggressive, investing $75 billion in AI infrastructure aimed at enhancing its cloud search and YouTube platforms, though its Gemini models have faced scrutiny for being inaccurate.
IBM plans to replace upwards of 30 percent of its back-office roles — around 7,800 positions — with AI over the next five years. They have already slowed hiring for clerical roles like human resources (HR), with posts on X noting hundreds of HR jobs have already been replaced, though IBM claims the company is adding programming and sales roles instead.
Duolingo, the popular language learning app, has committed to going “AI first,” phasing out human contractors for tasks like content translation, affecting 10 percent of its contractor workforce.
BT Group plc, originally British Telecom, says it plans to cut its workforce by up to 42 percent by the end of the decade.
The company’s CEO, Philp Jensen, says the pivot will make the organization more profitable and “leaner.”
“After completing the fibre roll-out, digitising the way we work, adopting artificial intelligence and simplifying our structure, BT would rely on a much smaller workforce and significantly reduced cost base by the end of the 2020s,” he said according to Reuters.
