2026-04-21 AI on Wall Street - Job Losses and Profits

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/21/business/ai-job-cuts-wall-street.html

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.

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At Wells Fargo, artificial intelligence software is generating instant memos on the creditworthiness of potential borrowers, creating the “pitchbooks” that banks use to convince companies to consider merger deals, and rerouting or automatically answering all types of phone calls from credit card customers, its executives say. Wells Fargo has cut employees each quarter of the past year. Although the bank has not specified exactly how many of those cuts have come because of A.I., its chief executive, Charlie Scharf, has been clear that the technology will reduce the number of people working in banking.