There’s a fair amount of hand-wringing over how much damage artificial intelligence will inflict on the jobs market: Fed chairman Jerome Powell is keeping a close eye on it, Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei reckons about 50% of entry-level white collar jobs will be eliminated, and the “Godfather of AI” Geoffrey Hinton predicts it will cause massive unemployment.
It’s perhaps no surprise, then, that a study from Pew Research last year showed approximately half of workers (52%) are worried about the future impact of AI use in the workplace, and 32% think it will lead to fewer job opportunities for them in the long run.
Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan is considerably less gloomy on the subject. He is of the opinion that while yes, AI will be disruptive across every level of the banking industry, economies and labor forces have come through massive technological transformations before without it leading to a complete meltdown in employment.
Speaking on the ‘This is Working’ podcast earlier this month, the Wall Street veteran said he looks to previous eras as an example for how large language model rollouts may impact the workforce: “The example I use—and whether it will be now or not, we’ll find out in the future—is in 1969, there were 80 million people working in the United States. In 2019, there were 160 million people. Think about the amount of technology that applied in America from that time, to 2019.
“People wrote … in 1969 that there would be no managers left in business because the computer itself would eliminate the need for managers, because they just moved information. Well, guess what? We have 20,000 managers today at Bank of America. And we were told in 1969, there was going to be no manufacturing left in the U.S., there was going to be no jobs left, the computers were going to take it away, that Japan was going to take over. You go through all that stuff, and then we doubled the amount of people who worked in the United States in 50 years.”
His balanced view isn’t unusual on Wall Street: JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon is also optimistic about the options AI presents for the working population. Just before Christmas, the CEO of the U.S.’s largest bank said, thanks to the transformative technology, “maybe one day we’ll be working less hard but having wonderful lives.” Likewise, he’s said people may live to 100 thanks to the tech.
But that doesn’t mean workers or policymakers can afford to ignore the fact that AI will lead to some disruption in the jobs market. As Dimon put it when speaking to Fortune last year: “It will eliminate jobs … people should stop sticking their heads in the sand.” Dimon called on society, government, and businesses to have a conversation about how to save jobs and retrain individuals, or understand how early retirement could be leveraged: “You can’t just take all these people and throw them on the street where the next job is making $30,000 a year, when they’re making $150,000. You’ll have a revolution.”
Quicker uptakes
Likewise, Moynihan was realistic about the technology’s ramifications. Like many Wall Street counterparts, BofA is already using automated models, testing, and algorithm models in trading groups.
Indeed, according to Evident AI’s index for the banking sector updated in October 2025, Bank of America rounds out the top 10 in overall ranking across talent, innovation, leadership, and transparency. At the moment, JPMorgan Chase leads the pack, followed by Capital One and Royal Bank of Canada.
Moynihan told the podcast that recent AI discoveries are augmentations of human capabilities, which is a “big benefit” and applies to everyone: “So it applies to our auditors, it applies to our lawyers, it applies to our investment bankers. Again, you can’t let it just rip because it can go sideways. But what this does is allows that flight time to shorten, so the knowledge time picks up.
“And that’s how to help young teammates or junior teammates in that area, and in all areas in our company. By the way, it’s going to affect senior people.”
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