With phones rattling, screens glowing, and the smell of stale coffee somewhere near the back, the trading floor continues to hum as it always has. A particular type of person is becoming more and more absent. The employee who used to build a deck on Sundays in preparation for Monday. The junior analyst who was familiar with every cell in a model. Not all of them have vanished yet. However, there are fewer seats than there were eighteen months ago, and this isn’t due to a fad in the market. It’s a non-sleeping piece of software.
The numbers don’t hold back. The six largest U.S. banks quietly eliminated about 15,000 jobs during the first quarter while earning about $47 billion in profit, an 18% increase from the same period last year. Mass layoffs and record earnings in one sentence. It has an almost surgical quality. In a variety of ways, JPMorgan, Citi, Bank of America, Goldman, Morgan Stanley, and Wells Fargo all cited artificial intelligence as the reason they could accomplish more with fewer employees.
| Key Information | Details |
|---|---|
| Topic | Generative AI’s impact on Wall Street employment |
| Q1 Combined Profit (Top 6 Banks) | $47 billion — up 18% year-over-year |
| Jobs Cut in Same Quarter | 15,000 across major institutions |
| Banks Involved | JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo |
| Citi’s Stated Workforce Reduction Goal | 20,000 positions |
| AI Vendors in Use at Citi | Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI |
| Most Affected Functions | Legal document review, credit analysis, pitchbooks, customer service, compliance |
| Geographic Spread of Cuts | Manhattan, San Antonio, Tucson, Tampa |
| Notable Executive Quote | “AI gives us places to go where we haven’t gone yet.” — Brian Moynihan, BofA CEO |
| Anthropic CEO’s Warning | Up to half of entry-level white-collar jobs at risk within five years |
Only those who have been following this industry for a long time will truly notice Brian Moynihan’s turnaround at Bank of America. He was on television reassuring his 210,000 employees that AI was a helper, not a threat, less than four months before the bank announced the elimination of a thousand positions. The language tightened after the quarter ended with a profit of $8.6 billion. He claimed that labor reduction and technology had improved the bottom line. AI specifically. The assurance had succeeded in keeping spirits high long enough for the plan to succeed.
It’s difficult to ignore how the cuts’ geography has changed. This is not just a Manhattan tale. Support hubs in San Antonio, Tucson, and Tampa—places banks established specifically because labor was less expensive there—are suffering significant harm. Most of the jobs that are being eaten are not the glamorous front-office positions. Regulatory compliance, document review, data processing, and the lengthy backbone of financial work that no one outside the industry ever considers are the layers beneath. jobs that are quiet. Silently vanishing.
Probably the best illustration of where this is headed is Citigroup. In the cautious language of investor calls, the bank has made a public commitment to reduce its workforce by roughly 20,000, portraying this as a journey toward efficiency and productivity. It is licensing AI from Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI in order to get there more quickly. This software currently reads legal documents, approves account openings, sends trade invoices, and sorts client data. tasks that required entire teams in the past.
However, the lingering detail is less significant. Employees from an internal program called A.I. Champions and Accelerators, whose role it was to persuade coworkers to adopt the new tools, were among those laid off by Citi recently. What they were selling took their place. No one who was paying attention missed the irony.
According to a recent study by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, generative AI is more likely to change the nature of work than eliminate it, at least in the near future. Perhaps. However, the study also acknowledges that the most vulnerable industries are finance, law, and technology, which is precisely where the headcount is shifting. As you pass a half-empty floor in a midtown tower, you get the impression that the researchers and the bankers are using the same data but coming to somewhat different conclusions about what constitutes “displacement.”
Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, has gone farther than most, stating that within five years, AI could eliminate half of entry-level white-collar jobs. It’s the kind of prediction that seems dramatic until you consider that the person making it is a technology developer. Wall Street has always maintained that AI will enhance human labor rather than replace it. One earnings call at a time, that promise is falling apart in real time, and it is still genuinely unclear what will happen next.
