Jamie Dimon has stuck to his trademark bluntness when talking about AI and jobs.
“It will eliminate jobs,” Dimon said at a Fortune conference in December. “People should stop sticking their heads in the sand.”
In the near term, Dimon said in an interview with CNN that JPMorgan’s head count remains steady, or even rises, as AI continues to roll out — if the bank does a “good job.” Analysts pressed Dimon at the bank’s 2026 company update in February, with one asking about the risk of mass job loss across sectors in a few years.
“We already have huge redeployment plans for our own people,” he said. “In fact, we spoke about it today, and we have to up that a little bit so we can take people who are displaced — and we have displaced people from AI — and we offered them other jobs.”
The CEO prophesied at the 2024 Alliance Bernstein conference that AI will “affect every job,” describing a future where AI handles tasks like note-taking and summarization at the push of a button.
The efficiency gains could still mean more hiring in areas like cybersecurity, where Dimon says banks will need AI to counter increasingly sophisticated fraud.
CFO Jeremy Barnum said during the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call on Tuesday that the bank is allowing for some additional hiring in technology “at the margin.”
On that same call, however, Barnum said that, generally speaking, they “want to make sure that when someone needs to get something done, whether it’s in technology or elsewhere, their first reaction is not, ‘Hire more people.'”
He has previously said JPMorgan is asking people to “resist head count growth where possible” and focus instead on efficiency.
The head of JPMorgan’s consumer business, Marianne Lake, has said operations staff could be 40% to 50% more productive over the next five years — a shift she said would lead to slower net head count growth, as each employee can handle far more work through automation, digital assistants, and self-service tools.
