Less than four months ago, Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan volunteered in a TV interview what he would say to his 210,000 employees about the chance of artificial intelligence replacing human work.
“You don’t have to worry,” he said. “It’s not a threat to their jobs.”
Last week, after Bank of America reported US$8.6bil (RM34bil) in profit for the first quarter – US$1.6bil (RM6.34bil) more than the same period a year earlier – Moynihan struck a different tone.
The bank’s bottom line, he said, was helped by shedding 1,000 jobs through attrition by “eliminating work and applying technology,” which he repeatedly specified was artificial intelligence. He predicted more of that in the months and years to come.
“AI gives us places to go we haven’t gone,” Moynihan said.
The veneer of Wall Street’s long-standing assertion – that AI will enhance human work, not replace it – is rapidly peeling away, as evidenced by the current quarterly earnings season. JPMorgan Chase, Citi, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo racked up US$47bil (RM186.35bil) in collective profits, up 18%, while shedding 15,000 employees.
All of them credited AI to some degree with helping cut jobs and automate work in areas ranging from the so-called back office, where tens of thousands of employees fill out paperwork to comply with various laws and regulations, to the front office, where seven-figure salaried professionals put together complicated financial transactions for corporate clients.
Unlike executives in Silicon Valley, few major financial figures are stating outright that AI is eliminating jobs.
Citi, for example, has pledged to shrink its workforce by 20,000 people through what one executive described to financial analysts last week as the company’s “productivity and efficiency journey.”
The bank is paying for AI software from Anthropic, Google, Microsoft and OpenAI to automatically read legal documents, approve account openings, send invoices for trades and organise sensitive customer data, among other tasks, according to public statements by bank executives and two people familiar with Citi’s systems.
Among the recent job cuts at Citi were scores of employees who were part of the bank’s “AI Champions and Accelerators” program, according to the two people, who were not permitted by the bank to speak publicly. The program involves Citi employees who perform their day jobs while also working to persuade their colleagues to adopt AI technologies.
A Citi spokesperson declined to comment.
Dire predictions about AI’s impact on employment have shaken the finance class before, most recently in February, when a bleak research report briefly jolted the stock markets by predicting that AI would force well-paid professionals to take up Uber driving.
Many major employers of white-collar workers describe AI technology as a tool that can eliminate the more tortured aspects of desk life and say it will free up office workers to pursue more valuable, higher-earning pursuits. Wall Street has been held up as a prime example of what economists call “complementarity,” in which human performance is improved, not supplanted, by AI.
Many on Wall Street have long argued that no software or chat agent can replace the personal relationships endemic to a financial career. What’s become clear is it can do a lot besides that.
At Wells Fargo, artificial intelligence software is generating instant memos on the creditworthiness of potential borrowers, creating the “pitchbooks” that banks use to persuade companies to consider merger deals, and rerouting or automatically answering all types of phone calls from credit card customers, its executives say.
Wells Fargo has cut employees each quarter of the past year. Although the bank has not specified how many of those cuts have come because of AI, its CEO Charlie Scharf has been clear that the technology will reduce the number of people working in banking.
“These are all opportunities to do things much, much more efficiently with AI than humans have been doing,” Scharf said in December. Most other bank chieftains, he said, “are afraid to say it because no one wants to stand up and say that we are going to have lower head count in the future.” – ©2026 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
