Artificial intelligence’s effect on the labor market “may go too fast for society,” potentially necessitating government and business collaboration to retrain workers and provide income assistance, Jamie Dimon said Wednesday.
The JPMorgan Chase CEO, speaking at the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, said he expects AI will result in the top U.S. bank employing fewer people in five years, even as the lender grows around the world. The bank had about 318,512 employees as of the end of the fourth quarter.
AI will eliminate and change jobs, and likely add some, too, Dimon expects. As the technology evolves rapidly, companies are clamoring to embed it into their operations, potentially upending the labor market. That means contingency plans could become essential, he indicated.
“If it goes too fast for society, that’s where government and business in a collaborative way should step in together and come up with a way to retrain people,” Dimon said. If, for example, some 2 million commercial truckers in the U.S. suddenly lost their jobs due to automation, it could spark “civil unrest,” the CEO said.
Such a move would be better phased in, he argued. “You can’t lay off 2 million truckers tomorrow,” he said.
“You want the government to tell you you can’t lay off a whole bunch of people at JPMorgan?” interviewer Zanny Minton Beddoes, editor-in-chief of The Economist, replied.
“And we would agree,” Dimon said, “if we have to do that to save society.”
With AI poised to usher in massive change, “do you have plans in place to make it work better if in fact it does something terrible?” Dimon said.
The CEO – who tends to pontificate on geopolitical and financial risks and domestic policy priorities in his annual shareholder letter – envisions local governments offering companies incentives to retrain workers, slow the pace of change AI has on their workforces and provide people with income assistance.
Dimon has said AI could be as transformational as the printing press or electricity, and he expects the technology to affect every job.
AI could be both an efficiency improver for the New York-based lender and reinvent what JPMorgan is at a fundamental level, he said. The technology is “used extensively” at the bank, in areas such as risk, fraud, marketing, customer service, idea generation, hedging and credit.
“If you take it to the next step – agents – that could change your business,” he said.
“It will change the way customers face us. We have to be very adept at saying, what do you want? You’re the customer, how do you want to access it?” Dimon said. “It may lead to us winning and losing in big areas.”
Two decades ago, JPMorgan’s biggest competitors were Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. Today, that list includes Stripe, PayPal, Dave, Chime, SoFi, Revolut and other fintechs, Dimon said.
“They’re coming at you, some to pick a sliver of the business, some to take your whole business,” the CEO said. “If you put your head in the sand, you will lose. I think that was true 30 years ago, but I think it’s probably more true today.”
“The brain power and money that’s going into this thing is extraordinary,” he said. “If we don't do our job faster, quicker – yeah, we’ll lose, too.”
