Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Brace for AI-Driven Job Cuts

Four of the world’s biggest banks are now saying versions of the same thing about their workforces, and the language is blunt.

Goldman Sachs President John Waldron has described the bank as a “human assembly line” ripe for automation, in comments reported by Bloomberg. Citigroup CEO Jane Fraser has told staff some roles “will no longer be required”, while JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said in December that AI “will eliminate jobs”.

A Bloomberg feature on 7 June drew the comments together, laying bare how openly the leaders of JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and Barclays now agree. AI will shrink parts of the banking workforce, and they are no longer hiding it.

Between them, the four banks employ more than 670,000 people, so even a modest reshaping of entry-level roles carries enormous weight. For HR leaders, the harder question sits one level down, in the graduate pipeline.

The clearest data point cuts against the strategy itself. Banks are reducing junior analyst classes by as much as two-thirds, according to Debasish Patnaik, senior partner and leader of McKinsey’s QuantumBlack AI arm. Yet those same cohorts supply roughly 62% of the banks’ AI talent.

That is the paradox now facing every bank CHRO. The entry-level roles being automated are also the training ground that produces the senior people AI cannot replace.

“Banking is an apprenticeship business. Today’s junior analysts become tomorrow’s managing directors,” Debasish told Bloomberg. “Senior judgment cannot be manufactured laterally.”

Attrition now, layoffs later

The cuts are unlikely to arrive as a single dramatic announcement. Dimon has pointed to attrition, redeployment, retraining and early retirement as the levers JPMorgan will pull, rather than relying on mass layoff rounds.

That model lets banks lower headcount quietly. They can slow replacement hiring, shrink analyst classes and move staff into technology roles while annual turnover does the rest.

The exposure has also climbed the org chart. “It’s fair to say middle office is vulnerable,” employment lawyer David Parsons of Mishcon de Reya told Bloomberg, noting that this wave of automation reaches jobs higher up the chain than previous ones.

There is a legal edge too. Parsons warned that cutting large numbers of junior or administrative staff, roles often held disproportionately by women, carries “huge discrimination risks” that employers are underpricing.

Where the hiring survives

Not every bank is pulling back at the entry level. Bank of America is committed to 2,000 summer interns and another 2,000 full-time recruits joining this month, even as it holds overall headcount flat and leans on AI for efficiency.

Goldman is also keeping the tap open, if narrower. CEO David Solomon has said out-of-school hiring could contract a little in the next few years as AI changes the talent mix. The firm still expects to take on thousands of interns and graduates.

The signal for talent leaders is a shift in what early-career roles are for. The grunt work that once trained analysts, building decks and reconciling data, is exactly what banks are automating first.

That leaves CHROs a difficult design problem. If the traditional apprenticeship is disappearing, banks will need a new way to turn graduates into the senior judgement they all agree machines cannot replicate.