Jamie Dimon says society should prepare for AI layoffs: ‘Now’s the time to start thinking about’ it

The longtime JPMorgan Chase CEO told investors at a company event on Tuesday that businesses and governments need to start preparing now in order to handle the labor disruption that AI could bring.

“I’m not predicting [it] can be a problem. I’m simply saying now’s the time to start thinking about what you do if it does,” Dimon warned.

Though Dimon’s remarks were characteristically blunt, he iterated, JPMorgan wasn’t going to put its “head in the sand” when it comes to AI transformation. To the contrary, he said, the bank is deploying AI aggressively and already has an LLM model that 150,000 people use every week.

But thanks to the productivity gains brought on by AI, it’s likely JPMorgan will employ fewer people in the next five years, Dimon said last month at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

While Dimon worries about how society will react to an exodus of AI-displaced employees, he is making sure JPMorgan isn’t caught off guard. In fact, the company is taking critical steps to prepare for a technologically-fueled transition, complete with “huge redeployment” plans he said are in place.

“We have displaced people from AI,” Dimon said, “and we offer them other jobs. They are usually well-trained and highly talented, very good at things.”

The broader concern, though, is what happens if society gets caught off guard by this disruption. Dimon illustrated his point with a hypothetical scenario he previously mentioned in Davos. Autonomous vehicles could, in theory, replace the two million commercial truck drivers in the U.S. overnight, saving lives, cutting fuel costs, and reducing wear on highways. 

But, Dimon said, the benefits don’t outweigh the broader costs associated with eliminating these jobs all at once. What would happen to the truck drivers who could see their six-figure income disappear overnight and may have to settle for a lower skilled job paying a fraction of what they were making previously, Dimon questioned.

“I was saying, ‘That’s kind of really bad, kind of civilly, should we as society agree to that?’ I don’t think so,” he said.

The answer, he said, is to phase in change incrementally, and give society time to adapt. This is not the first time Dimon has pushed this message. At Davos, he said AI’s effect on labor “may go too fast for society,” and added he would welcome a government ban on mass AI layoffs “if we have to do that to save society.” He also said local governments should offer incentives to companies to retrain workers.

Yet, Dimon was clear on Tuesday that AI is going to revolutionize business. He noted that while the technology’s results may not have fully surfaced, JPMorgan has deeply embedded AI in its operations and it plans to be at the frontier of this change. 

“I think the hardest thing to measure has always been tech projects,” he said. “That’s been true my whole life. It’s also been true my whole life, that tech is what changes everything.”