- Bank CEOs have praised the pivotal efficiency changes promised by AI.
- Some have said AI will cut jobs, and others say it will create more employment opportunities.
- We looked at the public record to see what banking's top executives are saying about head count.
Is AI coming for Wall Street's jobs? Not yet.
Some 60% of the 240 financial services CEOs surveyed by EY said they think investing in AI will maintain or even increase their current head count in 2026. Only 28% of those surveyed predicted the head count would drop this year.
Over earnings calls and more conference appearances, CEOs of Wall Street's biggest banks dropped more insight into how generative AI could boost productivity, replace some roles, and keep head count from growing.
The biggest players, many of which became bloated during the frenzied deal boom of the pandemic, have been slimming down their ranks over the last few years. It's becoming clearer that, while business is booming in wealth and investment banking, executives are signaling they want to do more with fewer people.
We've highlighted some of the most revealing comments from bank CEOs and CFOs on head count and AI.
David Solomon, CEO of Goldman Sachs
David Solomon's most definitive statement about how AI will affect Goldman came in a memo he released in 2025 alongside the firm's president, John Waldron, and CFO Denis Coleman.
The memo, announcing the third iteration of the bank's cross-bank initiative OneGS, said that AI will drive efficiency at the firm, which will mean slowing hiring and reducing roles. (Goldman, with its yearly culling of some employees, is no stranger to job cuts.)
"We will constrain head count growth through the end of the year, in addition to a limited reduction in roles across the firm," the memo read. "These targeted steps are consistent with our priorities of gaining more agility and creating the right team structures in order to implement effective AI solutions."
More recently, Goldman Sachs President John Waldron said generative AI is helping the bank automate more work and operate more efficiently without clearly signaling what it means for hiring.
"I often describe Goldman Sachs as a human assembly line," Waldron said Tuesday on CNBC, comparing Wall Street's AI push to the automation that transformed manufacturing.
Waldron said generative AI is allowing Goldman to digitize workflows, boost productivity, and cut costs.
"Our human assembly lines will become more digitized, digital agents will be our robots," Waldron said. "I'm not sure dynamically how the overall headcount will change, but I think the firm is going to get much more resilient and much more scalable."
Solomon has previously said that slowing hiring and increasing head count don't need to be contradictory; instead, the firm is focusing its hiring on the right talent.
"We need more high-value people," he told Axios last year. "We can afford more high-value people to expand our footprint and continue to grow and broaden our business."
He has said he continues to believe that AI will grow the firm's head count over the next 10 years.
Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase
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," predicting a future in which AI handles tasks like note-taking and summarization with 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 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.'"
Jane Fraser, CEO of Citi
Citi is in the midst of a multi-year turnaround led by the bank's CEO, Jane Fraser, to save roughly $2.5 billion and cut around 20,000 jobs.
In a memo sent to Citi's more than 200,000 employees in January, Fraser said she will "expect to see the last vestiges of old, bad habits fall away, and a more disciplined, more confident, winning Citi fully emerge in 2026."
Fraser said in the memo that, with AI and automation, some jobs will change, some will emerge, and "others will no longer be required."
At the bank's Investor Day earlier this month, Citi executive Gonzalo Luchetti said the bank expects headcount to continue declining this year as it leans more heavily on automation and AI to improve efficiency.
He said Citi is using technology to streamline processes and sees AI as a way to "turbocharge" productivity gains and drive further structural cost savings.
Fraser has previously explained how AI was already increasing productivity.
"AI-driven automated code reviews have exceeded 1 million so far this year and are dramatically improving our developers' productivity," she said during the bank's 2025 third-quarter earnings call. "This innovation alone saves considerable time and creates around 100,000 hours of weekly capacity."
Brian Moynihan, Bank of America CEO
At Bank of America, AI has been shaping how the bank approaches hiring.
SCEO Brian Moynihan said the bank has steadily cut employees in operational and processing roles while continuing to hire in areas like relationship management, technology, and cybersecurity. Speaking during the bank's first-quarter earnings call, he said the bank is using automation and AI to reduce routine work and manage staffing largely through attrition rather than layoffs.
"It comes from eliminating work and applying technology," Moynihan said, adding that AI "gives us places to go we haven't gone."
He gave another example of this in a previous call with analysts. In January, Moynihan teased how AI is making some tasks obsolete. The bank has 18,000 people on the payroll who code, he noted.
"Using the AI techniques, we've taken 30% out of the coding part of the stream of introducing a new product," he said. "That saves us about 2,000 people. So that's how we're applying it."
Charles Scharf, CEO of Wells Fargo
Wells Fargo has already shrunk its head count more than 25% since the second quarter of 2020, CEO Charles Scharf said during the company's fourth-quarter earnings call. He said that efficiency remains an "ongoing focus" for Wells Fargo.
In November, he told Reuters that the bank will likely "have less head count as we look forward." He said the lower head count is an "outcome" of the firm's focus on areas where it's "way too inefficient" and "way too bureaucratic." From 2018 to June of this year, the firm had an asset cap of $1.95 trillion, hindering its ability to grow.
In the same interview, Scharf called out those who are saying that AI won't reduce jobs.
"The opportunities that exist in AI are very significant, and anyone who sits here today and says that they don't think they'll have less head count because of AI either doesn't know what they're talking about or is just not being totally honest about it," he said.
Following up on those comments in early December, Scharf clarified that most people know head count will dip, "but they're afraid to say it, because no one wants to stand up and say that we should have — we're going to have lower head count in the future. It's a difficult thing to say."
Ted Pick, Morgan Stanley CEO
Morgan Stanley CEO Ted Pick didn't explicitly address how AI is impacting head count during the bank's fourth-quarter earnings call in January, but said "there is no more time to waste" when it comes to the technology.
The firm's CFO, Sharon Yeshaya, mentioned a specific operations example where the firm has outsourced some work to AI: "We used to have two teams necessarily checking each other on different documentation to make sure things are right. We now have one human team and one AI team."
