CEO Jamie Dimon, with a net worth of roughly US$2 billion, told investors on a 14 July earnings call that some of the bank’s units had reduced their numbers by 30 to 40 per cent. However, in the same call, he said the job cuts would not guarantee greater profits.
JPMorgan’s investment in the technology continues to grow, with the firm spending $20 billion on AI this year alone. Already, around 150,000 of its 300,000-strong workforce use large language models (LLMs) on a weekly basis, and it runs almost 1,000 use cases for AI, including back-office processing operations and fraud detection.
The technology has completely changed how the bank operates on a daily basis, and continues to do so, hence the drop in workforce numbers.
On Dimon’s point about not increasing profits, the CEO said AI lowers business expenses, but it does the same for rival companies, meaning that profit margins stay static.
AI is also becoming increasingly expensive to run as AI giants struggle with major losses on the technology. As a result, the cash that companies save from cutting staff is just going towards the increasing expenses needed to run AI. The second half of 2026 is expected to see generative AI spending spike. Increased investment plus higher running costs mean savings from job terminations fade quickly.
Dimon argued that the real value is that the productivity gains are really only beneficial to their customers and that AI spend is now just the cost of doing business, with any bank failing to adopt the technology likely to fall behind.
In April, Dimon warned that AI would transform the industry and alluded to the technology changing the bank’s operations.
“The importance of AI is real, and while I hesitate to use the word transformational – it is,” he said in the company’s annual shareholder letter.
“The pace of adoption will likely be far faster than prior technological transformations, like electricity or the internet. Those took decades to roll out, but this implementation looks likely to accelerate over the next few years.”
Dimon said that aspects such as internal systems, customer-facing services and more will change as a result of AI implementation, and that productivity will be boosted as a result.
“AI will affect virtually every function, application, and process in the company,” he said.
“It will have a huge positive impact on productivity.”
Dimon went so far as to say that AI will improve the world greatly, even beyond the banking industry.
“I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that AI will cure some cancers, create new composites, and reduce accidental deaths, among other positive outcomes,” he said.
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