Jamie Dimon’s penchant for straight talk means that Dimon is willing to admit that job cuts are coming.
“It will eliminate jobs,” Dimon said at a Fortune-hosted conference earlier this month. “People should stop sticking their heads in the sand.”
The comments echoed those Dimon made at a town hall for the firm’s employees in Columbus, Ohio, earlier this year, where he said that AI will “change some of your jobs,” whether as a “copilot,” a solution for “drudgery,” or by eliminating them.
More immediately for JPMorgan, according to an interview on CNN earlier this month, Dimon sees head count remaining steady, or even rising, as AI continues to roll out, “if we do a good job.”
Core to JPMorgan’s promise is increased efficiency, which Dimon explored during the 2024 Alliance Bernstein conference.
“It will affect every job, every application, every database, and it will make people highly more efficient,” Dimon said. “Like a lot of you clicking away, taking notes. You won’t have to do that because it will — you can just summarize what Jamie said. You push a button, and you don’t have to waste all that time.”
He also explained how increased efficiency could also create more jobs in cybersecurity.
“We use it for risk and fraud recognition, and bad guys are going to use it,” Dimon said. “So, we have to use it to counter the bad guys. We have to use it to get better and better in cyber.”
Other executives at the firm are even more explicit about how headcount at the firm is changing now.
At the Goldman Sachs financial services conference in early December, she said that operations staff are on track to be 40% to 50% more productive over five years, but stressed that this doesn’t translate into mass layoffs, but rather slower net head count growth, as each employee can handle far more work through automation, digital assistants, and self-service tools.
Jeremy Barnum, the firm’s CFO, said they’re “asking people to resist head count growth where possible and increase their focus on efficiency.”
While a more efficient future with an equal number of working and non-working weekdays may exist in the coming decades, according to Dimon, for now, hiring may slow.
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