"We've already displaced people because of AI β and we offered them other jobs."
Read that again. Slowly.
That sentence came out of Jamie Dimon's mouth β the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, the biggest bank on the planet by market cap β at an investor meeting on Monday. And he said it with the casualness of someone ordering a black coffee.
Welcome to the brave new world of corporate speak, where layoffs became "redeployment" and headcount cuts became "rewiring for the AI era."
What Actually Happened
The numbers, as always, tell the story that the pretty speeches try to hide.
JPMorgan has 318,512 employees β a number that's been practically flat over the past year. But underneath that apparent stability, all hell broke loose: the operations department lost 4% of its headcount, support lost 2%. Meanwhile, the "revenue generation" and client-facing crews grew 4%.
Translation: robots came in, back-office humans went out. And some of those people were "reassigned" to front-line roles. The ones who couldn't fit in? Well, the press release doesn't talk about them with the same enthusiasm.
The bank cut per-unit costs in fraud prevention by 11%. Each operations employee now handles 6% more accounts. Software engineers became 10% "more efficient." Beautiful numbers on a PowerPoint slide for investors to applaud.
But let's be honest here: "efficiency" in corporate-speak almost always means fewer people doing more work.
The $20 Billion Budget and AI's Hungry Mouth
JPMorgan has the biggest technology budget in banking: nearly $20 billion a year. It uses OpenAI and Anthropic models in its internal AI portal. It doubled its generative AI use cases this year alone, focusing on customer service and its own tech team.
Jeremy Barnum, the CFO, presented all of this with the face of a proud dad showing off his kid's report card at a parent-teacher conference. The bank wants to be "fundamentally reconfigured" for the age of artificial intelligence.
And this is where things get interesting β and a little sinister.
The Thought Experiment Dimon Didn't Answer
When an analyst asked if he feared mass unemployment because of AI, Dimon did what CEOs love to do: answered with a philosophical question instead of a concrete answer.
"What if autonomous trucks were introduced overnight? Would you do it knowing you'd put 2 million people on the street? And that their next job pays $25,000 a year, stacking shelves?"
Nice reflection, Jamie. Very thoughtful. Very Matrix β the Architect explaining the system while he himself runs the machine.
Because that's exactly what JPMorgan is doing, just in slow motion. It's not overnight, it's quarter by quarter. They're not truck drivers, they're operations analysts, support staff, people who processed documents. And the "next job" the bank offers might be as far from the original role as stacking shelves is from driving a truck.
What Nobody's Talking About
Dimon has a point on one thing: governments and society need to think about this now. But it's a bit convenient that the guy who's causing the displacement is the same one asking society to solve the problem, isn't it?
It's that old trick: privatize the profits, socialize the costs.
Nassim Taleb would say it's the textbook definition of no skin in the game. Dimon isn't going to lose his job to AI. His 318,000 employees? Some already have. Others will.
And the bank's spokesperson? "Declined to elaborate" on the redeployment plans. Classic.
Dimon compared AI to electricity and the Gutenberg press. Maybe so. But electricity didn't put out a press release saying it was "redeploying" candles. It just snuffed them out.
The question that remains: when your job lands in the crosshairs of "redeployment," who exactly is going to offer you that "other job"?
