Dive Brief:
- Leading banks are doubling down on tech talent recruitment and workforce training to scale AI initiatives, according to Evident Insights’ annual report on 50 of the largest global financial firms. The AI talent pool grew 25% among the banks analyzed, with Bank of America, Capital One, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo leading the charge, Evident found.
- The recruitment and training blitz paid tangible dividends. The 10 banks with the largest volume of AI talent had nearly double the number of reported use cases compared with the other 40 firms Evident tracked.
- “Banks are hiring more aggressively for AI expertise to sit alongside the heads of business,” Alexandra Mousavizadeh, co-founder and co-CEO of Evident, told CIO Dive. “There’s a huge interest in getting West Coast thinking from Silicon Valley — the AI product managers they can pull in from Meta, Google and OpenAI.”
Dive Insight:
Tech transformations can grind to a halt in the absence of development and deployment expertise. Banks that have spent recent years architecting data and cloud infrastructure to support AI adoption are deepening their bench of talent as returns on those investments begin to materialize.
Firms increased staffing across roles, from model risk and product management, to data engineering and software implementation, swelling the ranks of AI-related roles among large banks, Mousavizadeh said.
AI headcounts increased at five times the rate of all hiring at the companies analyzed by Evident, approaching 90,000. Nearly half that number were employed by 10 banks ranked highest in overall AI maturity.
Capital One, which recruited Chief Scientist and Head of Enterprise AI Prem Natarajan from Amazon, where he served as VP of Alexa AI, added more than 2,200 professionals to its AI staff, largely through a merger with Discover completed in May, according to Evident. The company has the second largest AI talent pool, behind only JPMorgan Chase in Evident’s current ranking.
“The ramp up is across all of the kinds of talent that you would expect that a bank needs,” said Mousavizadeh. “Banks are looking for chief architects and CTOs from Big Tech and there’s a [game of] musical chairs going on among the big banks with CTOs, CIOs and chief data officers.”
Both trends have been apparent of late at Citi, which has been busy rolling out AI platforms, agentic capabilities and coding tools this year.
Last month, the bank snagged its new Head of AI Shobhit Varshney from IBM, where he led the company’s U.S. data and AI consulting unit. Citi also tapped financial sector veteran Dipendra Malhotra to lead technology for its wealth division in March and appointed former PwC Senior Partner Tim Ryan to the head of technology and business enablement role last year. Malhotra previously served as head of analytics, AI and data for Morgan Stanley’s wealth management unit.
As enterprises shore up AI leadership positions, they are also investing in broader workforce upskilling initiatives. The number of banks tracked by Evident with publicly disclosed employee AI training programs rose to 38 from 32 last year. Evident also found that 33 of the 50 banks now offer specific AI training for senior leadership.
