Jamie Dimon has spoken out after a fellow bank president’s comments about job losses due to AI sparked backlash, suggesting he intends to care for employees displaced by emerging technology.
On Tuesday, Standard Chartered CEO Bill Winters described the planned reductions in support staff as “in some cases replacing low-value human capital with financial capital and the investments we are making.”
After facing rapid online criticism for her choice of words, Winters clarified her comments in an internal memo on Wednesday, which was seen by Business Insider and confirmed by a spokesperson.
“When a role disappears, it reflects a change in the job, not the value of the employee,” Winters wrote.
Mr. Dimon told Bloomberg at JPMorgan’s China Summit in Shanghai on Thursday that Mr. Winters, who spent 26 years at JPMorgan and rose to co-chief executive officer of the investment bank, could have worded his comments more carefully.
“Bill is a friend of mine, and we’re all saying something wrong,” the JPMorgan CEO said. “That was an awkward way to say it.”
The billionaire banker added that he believes AI will not only disrupt low-skilled workers. “Every app, every process, every job will be affected,” he said.
He described how the technology is transforming several parts of JPMorgan’s business, from marketing to fraud detection to hedging and document management, and said that’s just the “tip of the iceberg.”
Mr. Dimon spoke reassuringly about the prospect of large-scale layoffs at JPMorgan.
“We’re going to be prepared to say, ‘Okay, we love these people, they’re great, we’re going to take care of them.’ We’re going to retrain them, give them new skills, give them a better job, move them somewhere else, maybe take them into early retirement,” he said.
Dimon said it is an “obligation” for society as a whole to prepare in case AI causes mass job losses. He suggested that high schools and universities could partner with local businesses to offer training courses that give students practical skills and guarantee them a job after graduation.
“Over the next five years, there will be 8 million trade-related jobs in the United States that pay $100,000 a year,” Dimon said.
Dimon has been describing AI as a game-changing technology for some time. Earlier this year, he told CBS that the next 30 years could reduce the work week to 3.5 days, cure cancer, make planes and cars safer and give people more time to hike and enjoy hobbies.