Banks lay groundwork for mass workforce cuts as AI takes hold

LONDON – In the hope that he’ll land a job in finance, Andre Bonnick spends hours rehearsing what he’s going to say. He’s using keywords from job listings, making eye contact – following advice he has received from recruiters.

But Bonnick, a student at the University of Warwick, isn’t preparing to talk to a human hiring manager. He’s tackling initial screening rounds done by AI-powered software.

With more firms adopting artificial intelligence, students gunning for a career in banking and finance are preparing to be up against such technology at first interaction. If they get in the door, they’re then faced with the question of whether the jobs will be available to humans in the next few years.

Most top bank executives are in agreement: Jobs will be cut as AI is implemented.

JPMorgan Chase & Co chief executive officer Jamie Dimon said in December 2025 that the technology “will eliminate jobs”. Jane Fraser, Citigroup’s CEO, said some jobs “will no longer be required”, while Goldman Sachs president John Waldron referred to employees as a “human assembly line” ripe for automation.

As Standard Chartered CEO Bill Winters put it: “It is not cost cutting; it is replacing, in some cases, lower-value human capital with the financial capital and the investment capital we are putting in.” (He later apologised for his remarks.) 

With those recent comments, industry workers have been left dazed about whether their jobs are safe. Even for those in higher levels, the risk that artificial intelligence could eventually replace their roles has grown. 

And while executives, including Dimon and Barclays CEO C.S. Venkatakrishnan, have talked about retraining and reskilling employees to protect some jobs, it is unclear how that would work in practice, said David Parsons, an employment lawyer at Mishcon de Reya.

One investment banker in the United Arab Emirates, who asked not to be identified, joked that he may not be needed in the next five to 10 years, after he used Microsoft’s Copilot to help make a last-minute pitch in the lift before a client meeting.

“It is fair to say middle office is vulnerable,” Parsons said. “That is the difference with this wave of automation; it impacts jobs higher up the chain.” 

Students, who for years gravitated to finance for its stability and high-paying nature, are now finding fewer entry-level roles available to them. Student Andre Bonnick said: “I was looking at potentially applying for a master’s to give me another year to apply for jobs.”

Banks are cutting junior analyst classes by as much as two-thirds while sourcing roughly 62 per cent of their AI talent from those same cohorts, said Debasish Patnaik, senior partner and leader of QuantumBlack, McKinsey & Co’s AI consulting arm. 

While graduate intakes “will shrink”, banks are unlikely to shed them altogether, according to Patnaik. 

“Banking is an apprenticeship business. Today’s junior analysts become tomorrow’s managing directors,” he said. “Senior judgment cannot be manufactured laterally.”

Targeted use cases

By and large, banks are currently trying to implement AI across certain functions, including customer service, and transaction and trade monitoring.

Antony Jenkins, a former CEO of Barclays and founder of core banking platform 10x Banking, said: “Rather than looking for the Battlestar Galactica, all-singing, all-dancing bank run by agentic AI, we are going to see much more single-point use cases over the coming years.” 

Citigroup is rolling out a conversational AI-powered wealth management avatar that offers clients financial guidance. The multilingual avatar can advise on what to do when your bank certificates of deposit are maturing, for example, or how to manage your children’s college fund.

Barclays is using AI to monitor calls involving human customer service staff, which is helping to improve efficiency without putting jobs at risk, Venkatakrishnan said earlier in 2026. The firm said in February that it had seen efficiency gains, with more than eight million customer calls summarised by generative AI since the program was rolled out in October. 

Digital bank Revolut recently launched an in-app AI assistant called AIR that gives customers a granular breakdown of spending, sorting travel and essentials, or setting card controls. 

It is designed to make financial management “as easy and natural as sending a text”, said Julia Ponomareva, Revolut’s partner and general manager of customer experience and AI products.

In terms of hiring and interviewing functions, some recruiters think banks will not lean on AI. While Bonnick, the student, may be preparing to speak to an AI bot in screening interviews, banks are unlikely to use such technology because the risks are significant, according to Tom Lakin, global head of future of work at recruitment firm Robert Walters. At least one screening software company removed a facial analysis component in 2021, he added. 

Separately, some remain wary of the consequences of redundancies across certain functions.

Parsons said: “If you are laying off a large number of your junior workforce, or laying off administrative staff who are predominantly female, there are huge discrimination risks. It is an underpriced risk.”

There are also doubts over whether many of the job cut announcements so far have truly been related to AI. 

Dimon said at JPMorgan’s China summit in May: “I think a lot of companies have too much bureaucracy and they may use AI to cover up the fact that they should never have hired those people in the first place.” 

For many, AI has been touted as a way to bypass grunt work. Still, presentation decks and valuation models are broadly accepted as a necessary learning tool. 

Graduates, broadly speaking, are finding it difficult to break into the sector, said Timothy Lee, a student at Warwick University who leads its business and finance society. 

“Before Covid-19, class sizes were increasing a lot,” Lee said, though he has accepted a job from Wells Fargo & Co. “When banks were doing well, they were hiring more but now, they don’t need to.”

To be sure, some banks are pressing ahead with plans to hire interns and new employees. Bank of America is committed to the 2,000 summer interns and another 2,000 full-time recruits set to join in June across eight lines of business. 

Still, the bank wants headcount to stay flat and is using AI to encourage efficiency. BLOOMBERG