There's a classic scene in The Godfather where the Don looks straight into the camera and says out loud what everyone already knew but nobody had the guts to admit.

Jamie Dimon did that last week.

Not in some marketing fluff interview. In an investor meeting — where lies come with a price tag. And what he said was this, no sugarcoating:

"We already have enormous redeployment plans for our own people. People have been displaced by AI — and we've offered them other jobs."

Translation from corporate-speak into plain English: AI is already pushing people out at the world's biggest bank. They're just being polite enough to offer a seat in musical chairs before the music stops for good.

The number that says everything by saying nothing

JPMorgan has 318,512 employees. The headcount barely moved from last year. Looks great, right? Like nobody got cut.

But then you look under the hood — as Taleb would say, you go beyond the surface narrative — and here's what you find:

  • Operations and support: -4% and -2%, respectively.
  • Client-facing and revenue-generating roles: +4%.
  • Each operations employee now manages 6% more accounts.
  • Fraud-fighting cost: -11% per unit.
  • Software engineers: 10% more efficient.

This isn't organic growth. This is a machine that grinds through repetitive functions and spits people out the other side, hoping they learn something new fast enough to avoid becoming an unemployment statistic.

The bank spends nearly $20 billion a year on technology. The biggest tech budget in global banking. They run OpenAI and Anthropic models inside an internal AI portal. They've already doubled their generative AI use cases just this year.

While you're reading this, some junior analyst at the center of the financial world is being slowly replaced by an LLM that doesn't ask for a raise, doesn't take vacations, and doesn't complain about their boss.

The question nobody wants to answer

Dimon ran an interesting thought experiment. He asked: what if self-driving trucks were rolled out overnight?

"Would you do it if it put 2 million people out of work? The next job is stocking shelves for $30,000 a year."

Notice what he did not say: that it won't happen.

He said society needs to start thinking about the problem now. Which, let's be honest, is the polished way of saying: "the train has already left the station, and the union didn't even buy a ticket."

Dimon compares AI to electricity and Gutenberg's printing press. That's not hyperbole — it's history. The printing press wiped out the scribe profession. Electricity killed the tallow candle market. The difference is Gutenberg took decades to become a disruptive force. GPT-5 took months.

Skin in the game — or not

This is where I need to be straight with you.

Most of the "experts" flooding your timeline with takes on this news have never managed payroll, never decided to let someone go, never signed a severance check. They talk about disruption with the cold detachment of people who lose nothing if they're wrong.

Dimon has 318,000 employees under his watch. When he talks about "redeployment," he's talking about real people — with electric bills, mortgage payments, and kids in school.

That doesn't make him a good guy. JPMorgan is not a nonprofit. But at least he has enough skin in the game to tell the truth in a room full of investors instead of peddling hope on a podcast.

What to do with this information?

First: stop thinking this is only a bank teller problem. Lawyers, accountants, financial analysts, copywriters, boilerplate coders — the list is long and grows every week.

Second: understand that financial markets will keep pricing this in with a lag. While JPMorgan announces 10% efficiency gains among engineers, there are still people out there asking whether AI is "really going to be a thing."

It already is.

Third — and this is the question you should be losing sleep over:

What part of your job today could a well-trained LLM not do within 18 months?

If the answer took more than 5 seconds to come to you, you've got a problem. And no corporate "redeployment" plan is going to solve it for you.