Jamie Dimon’s penchant for outspokenness means he’s willing to admit that layoffs are coming.
“Jobs are going to disappear,” Dimon said at a Fortune-sponsored conference earlier this month. “People need to stop sticking their heads in the sand.”
The comment echoes remarks Dimon made earlier this year at a town hall for the company’s employees in Columbus, Ohio, where he said AI would “change some parts of your job” as a “co-pilot,” as a solution to, or by eliminating, “monotonous tasks.”
More directly for JPMorgan, Mr. Dimon said in an interview with CNN earlier this month that he sees the company’s headcount remaining flat or even increasing “if we do well” as AI adoption continues.
Central to JPMorgan’s promise is increased efficiency, which Dimon discussed at the 2024 AllianceBernstein conference.
“It’s going to impact every job, every application, every database, and make people much more efficient,” Dimon said. “Like a lot of people click and take notes, you don’t have to, because that’s what happens. You just have to summarize what Jamie said. You just press a button and you don’t have to waste time.”
He also discussed the potential for more jobs to be created in the cybersecurity field due to increased efficiency.
“We use this for risk and fraud awareness, but the bad guys will use it,” Dimon said. “So we need to use it to counter the bad guys. We need to use it to become better and better in the cyber field.”
Other executives at the company were more specific about how the company’s headcount is currently changing.
In operations, the “tip of the spear” in leveraging this new technology, management expects employee headcount to trend down by 10% through 2029, said Marian Lake, chief executive officer of consumer and community banking.
“We’re asking people to resist headcount growth as much as possible and focus more on efficiency,” said Jeremy Burnham, the company’s chief financial officer.
Dimon said that while a more efficient future may come in the coming decades, where working and non-working days are the same, hiring may slow for now.
