We all knew this day would come.*
From the New York Times, April 21:
“A.I. gives us places to go we haven’t gone,” said one bank’s chief executive.
Less than four months ago, Bank of America’s chief executive, Brian T. Moynihan, volunteered in a TV interview what he would say to his 210,000 employees about the chance of artificial intelligence replacing human work.
“You don’t have to worry,” he said. “It’s not a threat to their jobs.”
Last week, after Bank of America reported $8.6 billion in profit for the first quarter — $1.6 billion more than the same period a year earlier — Mr. Moynihan struck a different tone.
The bank’s bottom line, he said, was helped by shedding 1,000 jobs through attrition by “eliminating work and applying technology,” which he repeatedly specified was artificial intelligence. He predicted more of that in the months and years to come.
“A.I. gives us places to go we haven’t gone,” Mr. Moynihan said.
The veneer of Wall Street’s longstanding assertion — that A.I. will enhance human work, not replace it — is rapidly peeling away, as evidenced by the current quarterly earnings season. JPMorgan Chase, Citi, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo racked up $47 billion in collective profits, up 18 percent, while shedding 15,000 employees.
All of them credited A.I. to some degree with helping cut jobs and automate work in areas ranging from the so-called back office, where tens of thousands of employees fill out paperwork to comply with various laws and regulations, to the front office, where seven-figure salaried professionals put together complicated financial transactions for corporate clients.
Unlike executives in Silicon Valley, few major financial figures are stating outright that A.I. is eliminating jobs.
Citi, for example, has pledged to shrink its work force by 20,000 people through what one executive described to financial analysts last week as the company’s “productivity and efficiency journey.”
The bank is paying for A.I. software from Anthropic, Google, Microsoft and OpenAI, to automatically read legal documents, approve account openings, send invoices for trades and organize sensitive customer data, among other tasks, according to public statements by bank executives and two people familiar with Citi’s systems.
Among the recent job cuts at Citi were scores of employees who were part of the bank’s “A.I. Champions and Accelerators” program, according to the two people, who were not permitted by the bank to speak publicly. The program involves Citi employees who perform their day jobs while also working to persuade their colleagues to adopt A.I. technologies....
(metaphor party mix)
And as noted back in 2016's:
Artificial Intelligence and the Role Of the Literary Critic
First they came for the literary theorists and I did not speak out because--well, you know the drill.*
*First they came for the journalists and I did not speak out-Related:
Because I was not a journalist.
Then they came for the ad agency creatives and I did not speak out-
Because I was not an ad agency creative. (see below)
Then they came for the financial analysts and I
said 'hang on one effin minute'.
- Robot Lobbyists Say Robots Good, Create Jobs
- Sure, MoneyBeat Says Their Posts Are Not Written by Robots But How Can We Know?
- Automation Steals Jobs: Röböts Playing Motörhead
- A Deep Dive Into the Future of RoboAnalysts (will entry level hedgies still command $353K to start?)
- A Job the Robots Won't Take: Become a Financial Charlatan
- Robot Writing Moves from Journalism to Wall Street
- "The automation of creativity: scary but inevitable"
