Job Cuts Driven By AI Are Rising On Wall Street 59
Firms like Bank of America, Citi, Wells Fargo, and others are reporting strong profits while reducing head count and automating more work. "All of them credited A.I. to some degree ... 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," reports the New York Times. From the report: Less than four months ago, Bank of America's chief executive, 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 earlier -- 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 executives 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.
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 executives 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.
Equilibrium (Score:2, Interesting)
https://www.scry.llc/2025/01/2... [scry.llc]
"UBI (universal basic income) is a dysfunctional attempt by rentier capitalists to resist equilibrium. A better fix is redistribution of remaining work across the entire workforce. Income stays bound to work and creates more potential customers. During the 1930s, governments mandated shorter workweeks and banned child labor which forced a return to equilibrium."
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Every single one of us knew that eliminating workers was the primary reason for the worldwide interest in AI. Everyone who said anything to the contrary was lying, and everyone who heard them knew it. Absolutely zero people believed that AI was going to lead us to some strange utopia where everyone was paid for work they didn't have to do anymore. The article's tone "oh look, they made all this money and didn't hire more people and its because of AI and oh what hypocrites they are!" is just silly. This
Re:Equilibrium (Score:4, Insightful)
Every single one of us knew that eliminating workers was the primary reason for the worldwide interest in AI
You can say it like that, and make it sound super evil ... but none of us our crying over the 99.9% of horse shit sweepers who lost their jobs when automobiles were invented.
ELIMINATING JOBS IS NOT INHERENTLY A BAD THING! When technology improves things, jobs disappear ... and we all want technology to improve our society.
What is inherently bad is wealth concentration. AI is just a drop in the bucket of helping "the rich getting richer". Long before AI existed, the wealthy had already made systemic changes to exacerbate that (very real) problem in our society.
All of this "AI is stealing our jerbs!" stuff is a distraction (like similar arguments about illegal immigrants). It keeps people from noticing and addressing the real problem: wealth concentration.
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Automobiles employed a LOT of people, easily out numbering the ones that no longer picked up horse shit. That is a big difference from AI.
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Yes, but not at first: it took awhile before the whole Ford factory line thing even started.
Meanwhile, companies using AI employ lots of people too. It's very possible AI will open entire categories of employment we can't dream of yet (just like 1920's Americans couldn't have dreamed of working at a Ford plant).
Again, it's just how technology works ... but it's not our real problem. Our real problem is all the wealth concentrated in a handful of individuals. It would be a problem whether we had amazing ne
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New jobs we haven't dreamed of yet huh? I, for one, don't fancy becoming a battery for our robot overlords, left to wallow in a dreamlike state, sustained by a heady mix of chemicals and the dead..
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It won't be quite that fast... I think it'll be more like "The Second Renaissance (both parts)" before we reach the human battery stage.
The "jobs" in the immediate future will be either helping train the AIs or approving AI-generated coded programs and reports endlessly faster than you can read/think.
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It's very possible AI will open entire categories of employment we can't dream of yet
The whole point of AI is for it to do work instead of us. Fantasizing about it creating new jobs for us to spend our lives doing instead of enjoying existing is really quite sad. We should be envisioning what we can spend our lives doing instead of slaving away for someone else's profit in hopes that we will be permitted to retire someday.
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who does the AI work for? is it working for corporations which are reducing employees while there still exists a need for employment?
if so slaving maybe the way future.
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It's the way of the present, so that checks out.
Re:Equilibrium (Score:4, Funny)
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Remember the robot harvesters in "Logan"? Soon, they'll have robots flipping burgers at BK, AI taking orders. Robots doing your shopping and delivering it to you in your self-driving car, your Laz-Z-Boy just drives out and unloads you from the car to it, while a robot unloads the groceries and puts them away.
Maybe it'll get to the point where they can just build stuff like in Tron: Ares... that way, they can program in a lifespan, so your TV is only good for a couple years, then they just print a new TV,
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AI is just a drop in the bucket of helping "the rich getting richer". Long before AI existed, the wealthy had already made systemic changes to exacerbate that (very real) problem in our society.
True. But AI will increase the rate of wealth concentration while simultaneously making it much easier for them to simply ignore the rest of us.
All of this "AI is stealing our jerbs!" stuff is a distraction (like similar arguments about illegal immigrants). It keeps people from noticing and addressing the real problem: wealth concentration.
Thank you for saying that. I hadn't thought of AI as a distraction, probably because I've known about the problem of wealth concentration for a long time. But you're right - a lot of people will see AI as a cause of the problem rather than simply another symptom of it.
Re:Equilibrium (Score:4, Insightful)
You can say it like that, and make it sound super evil ... but none of us our crying over the 99.9% of horse shit sweepers who lost their jobs when automobiles were invented.
That's both an incorrect statement and an invalid comparison.
First, people did not lose their horse-related jobs "when automobiles were invented". The transition from horse/oxen power to machine power took 150 years. Jobs and economies gradually adapted over generations as steam locomotion spread, and then again over decades as automobiles spread. Trains and cars didn't take over the world 3-5 years after their major breakthroughs. There were millions of square miles of Earth's land surface where no railroad tracks or roads went, well into the mid-20th century. Even in the wealthy USA, it wasn't until after World War II that one car per household became the default. In the 1940s in the USA South there were still plenty of rural sharecroppers without a personal automobile. Same goes for working class folks in dense metropolitan areas with streetcar systems and city planning that did not yet prioritize cars and parking over all other needs.
Second, the automobile did not eliminate the need for powered motion. It's payload wasn't to eliminate movement. Its payload was to upgrade the method humans used for moving things to a more powerful method of moving things. The same humans were still moving the same things for generations/decades, because those things still needed to be moved. The AI/algo/agents being proffered this year are not saying "We'll take the same humans and give them a more powerful method of producing the same things they have been producing". They're not replacing human-driven horses that cart veggies to market, with human-driven trucks that cart veggies to market. They are making it so the veggies hop off the vines and drive themselves to the market.
I can understand the temptation to say, "Look at history-- there have been several big scares about The End Of Labor, but we always discovered some new market for goods and services several billion people could labor to produce". But this seems akin to saying that since the temperature change from 10C degrees to 25C isn't that bad and was composed of 3 changes of 5C each, that therefore we can confidently assume this pattern will remain true and the change from 25C to 40C will be just as comfortable.
That assumption fails for the same reason the "buggy whip manufacturer" comparison fails -- it presumes that the nature of human beings plays no role in determining whether a result succeeds or fails. It overgeneralizes the wrong rule: "Human metabolism can easily adapt to changes of 15C" instead of "Human metabolism can fairly easily adapt to most temperatures between 10C and 25C without major intervention". In the same manner, your argument overgeneralizes "The average human cognition which could easily adapt from manual labor in the fields to manual labor in the factories, can just as easily adapt to manipulating nuanced verbal abstractions of statistical inference within logic frameworks which update every 3-6 months".
Thus, it is not sufficient to merely hand-wave and say "Past changes have been adapted, so future changes will always be adapted". You must actually enter the fray and argue why the consequences of this particular change is a member of the set containing the consequences of all those previous changes. Otherwise what you have is not an argument, but a belief. Induction is not a proof of reality. Induction is a description of what we have observed, and that if the previous conditions hold, then we have reason to expect our observed event to repeat. But the "if" is doing a ton of heavy lifting.
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"AI is just a drop in the bucket of helping "the rich getting richer"" I do not view it that way, I see it as a powerful tool of the rich to remain on top of the heap. It divorces their wealth creation from the people that have made that possible in the past. And it gives them another way to threaten the proles.
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Absolutely zero people believed that AI was going to lead us to some strange utopia where everyone was paid for work they didn't have to do anymore.
I wish you were right, but something tells me that you aren't [slashdot.org].
I'm pretty sure that "Alex Bores, a former Palantir employee and current Democratic House candidate in New York" is like you and me in that he also doesn't believe in an AI utopia for the proles. But he's betting that a lot of other proles WILL believe that - and I'm betting that he's right.
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Every single one of us knew that eliminating workers was the primary reason for the worldwide interest in AI.
Only employers might think this way. Obviously, no one who wasn't an employer would even bother to think this way. For the vast majority of people who are not employers, the primary reason for interest in AI was the use cases that would either enable new applications or make existing applications so much more functional that new use cases would be enabled.
Absolutely zero people believed that AI was going to lead us to some strange utopia where everyone was paid for work they didn't have to do anymore. ... Warnings about how this might result in a depression won't stay anyone's hand.
While individual employers might lay off their own workers in an attempt at cost savings, the macro economy won't tolerate a mass loss of jobs and the e
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AI programming at least will create a golden era for hackers.
gigantic piles of easily exploitable code written by machines with infinite ego, and all the displaced but skilled programmers looking for a way to survive.
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A better fix is redistribution of remaining work across the entire workforce.
Better for who?
During the 1930s, governments mandated shorter workweeks and banned child labor which forced a return to equilibrium
Yes, that certainly helped prevent civil unrest.
But now we're not going to have enough work for everyone to work full time, and the people who own everything won't let anyone have enough money to live on if they don't do that. Actually, they won't let lots of people who DO work full time have enough to live on.
Do you have a proposal as to how people can get their needs met without eating the rich?
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This is satire, right?
1. Business fought tooth and nail against shorter work weeks and banning child labor. (Def: "tooth and nail" - look up "Business Plot").
2. Allegedly, this will eliminate still more jobs. Where are the people who have been laid off going to work? In the seventies and eighties, they said everyone would get better jobs in the "information economy". Now, they've got nothing.
3. It's tech people (and customer support) being thrown out of work. I strongly encourage you to call your tech suppo
A few things to keep in mind (Score:3, Insightful)
It doesn't matter if it does. It's a blows up and costs a business some money odds are very good that the savings from wages will more than cover that.
What's worse is because we don't enforce antitrust law if a company goes down to tubes because it relied too heavily on AI it can just buy out any potential competitors and jack up prices on products you need to live and make back all the money.
Second there's basically two possibilities here, either the AI works and they got the fire a bunch of people or the AI doesn't work but they fired them anyway and the survivors have to work harder to keep their jobs.
Remember no antitrust law enforcement so if you get shit canned and try to start a business then you will be targeted and best case scenario you might get a buyout if you are under the radar long enough but more likely they just run you out of business.
Companies don't need good products anymore because they don't have to compete. So there is no floor and they can make things as shitty as they want and if you have a problem with it tough shit.
You could of course just stop consuming all together but at the very least you need food and shelter and medicine and some minimal financial services and transportation. So good luck stopping all consumption.
The point I'm getting at is that fundamental underpinnings of a functional economy have broken down and we refuse to acknowledge that fact.
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I thought it was a series of tubes. *smirk*
It's also clear he's never actually tried running his own business. The way that the deck is stacked against you isn't that you'll be targeted and run out of business (what is that anyway, a TV trope?), it's that you'll have a hard time achieving profitability because small businesses get raped on wholesaler pricing, and the bang for your buck when advertising does not scale down linearly.
Plus, unless you're staring a business to compete against something people r
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Whenever I bring up the fundamental problems of capitalism people tell me that it's okay because capitalism is self-correcting. If a business does bad things people will stop patronizing that business because there will be a competitor that does a better job with a better product.
You're actually just kind of proving my point.
Re:A few things to keep in mind (Score:5, Insightful)
The change that will need to take place will not happen until we see a world where company profits are decimated by the fact that no company employs enough humans to continue to drive consumerism. We decided a long time ago, at least here in the United States, that corporations are more important than people. We won't care when people are hurt. We'll care when companies are hurt. And the only hurt those entities understand is loss of profit.
Of course, the usual government reaction to loss of profits is to hand over tax dollars to the corporations to help them tide themselves over until the next wave of consumerism. If we end up in a world where there aren't enough people working to provide the government with income tax on a regular basis, and there aren't enough consumers to provide sales tax or a regular basis, and enough people are rendered homeless to start cutting into property taxes outside the larger corporate entities, then the government will have to come up with a new plan other than, "hand over money we can no longer provide." As much fun as it's been for them to pretend continually creating money from nothing is somehow providing it, that cycle is about to hit an end-point nobody's really ready for.
It's gonna get real interesting as automation continues to impact the workforce. What's really sad is we've seen signs it could happen coming for a while now, and no one with the power to do anything about it, or prepare for it, is willing to do anything more than preach about how glorious the future will be when no one can work a steady job and no one has the money from work to be able to consume as the entire economy requires to keep lubricated and running.
So that's just techno feudalism (Score:1, Troll)
Basically we are looking at the end of capitalism without socialism replacing it. Instead you will have a hereditary class of kings and queens, and they will have a handful of engineers to keep everything running and a handful of violent thugs to keep the engineers in line and to occasionally exterminate the masses of they become
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they're already beyond where money matters, finbros tell them they've acquired this and liquidated that and more imaginary zeroes have been added on, all in the pursuit of more imaginary zeroes they'll never directly touch
what is the upper limit of what they can directly touch? a 24-7 regiment of caviar, hookers, and blow? they could buy a warehouse of it, more than they could ever consume in their entire lifetime, a row of warehouses, and still not put a dent in their their centralized galaxy
the scale is i
capitalism w/o socialism replacing it (Score:2)
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Will AI ever replace the CEO? (Score:5, Interesting)
What if the first person to go was the CEO?
Would they still be pushing so hard to use AI?
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If they replaced the CEO with AI, you can bet on it.
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It's already happening. Zuck is replacing himself in the boardroom with AI Zuckerberg. (and in the bedroom with Black Guy Cuclkeberg)
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Enhance vs replace (Score:3)
It's all the same. If you enhance a process it will take fewer resources to complete. Ergo, you need fewer people.
Yeah right (Score:3)
Job cuts *excused* by AI, mostly. Still, given that this is the trend, shareholders will likely punish firms that don't do "AI" layoffs.
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Correct. The AI angle is fucking nonsense excusing the usual shitty corporate behaviour.
Another worry (Score:2)
I'm pretty worried that all interdepartmental communication (those regulations, the forms for the regulations, invoices, contracts, lawsuits, etc) will transform into bloated gobbledygook that only AIs can read and write. They will have made their own language that we won't understand and will have to start trusting them to accurately translate between it and human language.
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You mean just like lawyers and programmers?
Customer Disservice (Score:2)
I use one of the large banks named in this article.
Last weekend I had a question about a service, it's something I already use, I just needed one piece of information about it.
Their web "help" was just stone stupid - asked a formulaic question, then offered the same set of options as found at the top of the page for the service in questions. I got curious and poked around, it was literally nothing but a "no matter what question give one of half a dozen links" and then ask if the user was satisfied.
I tried G
The sad irony (Score:2)
'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.'
I'm Not Buying the AI Thing (Score:3, Insightful)
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Data center (Score:2)
Work on building data centers. Vocational skills. Putting up drywall. Plumbing. Electrical. Home remodeling.
Train coders to do drywall and HVAC. Think about that, the economy would advance a lot if we get 1 million more construction workers.
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" if we get 1 million more construction workers."
I continue to be annoyed that we describe "N construction workers employed on a site" as "N jobs created" when those "jobs" only exist for the length of the project.
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You reckon there's going to only be one project ever?
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Robots building houses and data centers from not even a foundation to move-in ready isn't that hard... "pick the model in our catalog, if you want to customize it you can using our tools".
An AI backs up a semi trailer that folds out into several robots that lay the foundation (they'll even have a robotic system for digging a basement that's part of the trailer-bot, if you want a basement) and erect the framing that has the drywall and insulation already on it (pre-assembled by an AI machine that just feeds
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We are at least 50 to 75 years away from that.
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I'm betting more like 5-10 years... because, hiring humans to do stuff is expensive and doesn't give more money to the company... a robot could easily take a panorama pic of the wall studs, hold the drywall up and use computer vision to know where the studs are and never miss on a single screw (yeah, yeah... I know lots of jokes could be made).
It's the same thing with pre-assembled sections or walls or "manufactured housing"... it's done that way to save on the costs of 60 guys taking union breaks all the
Jobs cut due to AI != jobs replaced by AI (Score:3)
For the most part, job cuts currently driven by AI are about freeing up money to pay for the compute infrastructure to run the AI. They haven't even made the AI to do the work, so the work is currently being left undone.
Yes.. But. (Score:2)