Less than four months ago, the chief executive of Bank of America, Brian T. 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 $8.6 billion in profit for the first quarter — $1.6 billion more than the same period a year ago — Mr. 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.
“A.I. gives us places to go we haven’t gone,” Mr. Moynihan said.
The veneer of Wall Street’s longstanding assertion — that A.I. 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 $47 billion in collective profits, up 18 percent, while shedding 15,000 employees.
All of them credited A.I. 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 in Silicon Valley, few major financial figures are stating outright that A.I. is eliminating jobs.
Citi, for example, has pledged to shrink its work force 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 A.I. software from Anthropic, Google, Microsoft and OpenAI, to automatically read legal documents, approve account openings, send invoices for trades and organize 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 “A.I. 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 A.I. technologies.
A Citi spokeswoman declined to comment.
Dire predictions about A.I.’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 A.I. would force well-paid professionals to take up Uber driving.
Many major employers of white-collar workers describe A.I. 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 A.I.
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 convince 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 exactly how many of those cuts have come from A.I., its chief executive, 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 A.I. than humans have been doing,” Mr. Scharf said in December. Most of 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.”
“It’s a difficult thing to say,” he added.
For those with a jaundiced view of the financial industry, it might be easy to dismiss these job losses as the troubles of the well-off professional class. (Wall Street awarded $49.2 billion in bonuses last year alone, per New York State data.)
But the job losses are not just confined to Eastern U.S. hubs of global finance. They are also affecting employees in lower-cost cities across the nation where banks and other asset managers have moved staff in recent years. Citi’s layoffs this month included corporate employees in San Antonio; Tucson, Ariz.; and Tampa, Fla.
There remains some optimism for employees. At Morgan Stanley, famed for its thousands of financial advisers who cater to the well-to-do, executives have said publicly they won’t replace jobs with A.I.
The head of its wealth management division in February talked up the technology in outright heroic terms, likening an A.I. tool that will suggest investments for clients to “J.A.R.V.I.S., from ‘Iron Man,’ but for managing money,” a reference to the fictional Tony Stark’s formless butler.
An altogether different movie comparison came to mind for Steven Alexopoulos, a longtime banking analyst, in a 102-page research report in January for TD Bank, Canada’s second largest. He cited the film “M3gan,” in which “an A.I.-driven doll moves from the role of friend, teacher and playmate” into “a force that must be protected against.”
He predicted that A.I. would lead banks to an initial “profit surge,” quickly followed by a “fortune reversal period” in which customers rely on the technology to find higher-interest-paying bank accounts and cheaper loans, crimping lenders’ ability to make money and ultimately leading to mass layoffs and bank closures.
This month, Mr. Alexopoulos left TD, and a colleague at the bank said he has not been replaced.
In a LinkedIn post, Mr. Alexopoulos wrote that after more than a quarter-century as a bank analyst he was trying out a new career: researching A.I.
