Dive Brief:
- Banks ramped up AI recruitment over the last six months as large financial firms reported efficiency gains from investments in the technology, Evident Insights said in a Wednesday report. The research firm tracks 50 of the largest banks in North America, Europe and Asia.
- With JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo and Citigroup leading the charge, the industry increased its pool of AI model development, platform engineering and project management technicians by nearly 13%. The increase was the largest six-month jump in two years, Evident said.
- “Away from the market noise and volatility, the leading banks are quietly but relentlessly pressing forward with AI transformation,” Alexandra Mousavizadeh, Evident co-founder and co-CEO, said in the report. “AI roles may be the only safe jobs in banking right now.”
Dive Insight:
In the quest to wrest business value from generative AI, the banking sector is seeing returns from investments in specialized talent.
While total headcount among the banks analyzed by Evident declined 3% over the last two years, AI hiring steadily gained momentum, growing from just over 60,000 roles in September 2023 to nearly 80,000 in March.
Evident placed specialized AI skills in three primary buckets: developers who create algorithms and train models; engineers who build data pipelines and platforms; and product managers charged with deploying AI capabilities. All three experienced the six-month bump in banking, with product manager headcount growing 42%, Evident found.
Banks are “adding talent with increased precision, laser-targeting their efforts on where hiring will help scale AI use cases that deliver measurable value,” Mousavizadeh said.
Evident cited generative AI-fueled client-facing interfaces, such as Capital One’s Chat Concierge and JPMorgan Chase’s Quest IndexGPT investment tool, as examples of scalable applications that are creating value.
Capital One’s generative AI development was built on a decade of cloud modernization. The company will expand its consumer financial services portfolio through a $35-billion merger with Discover, approved by the Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency earlier this month.
In addition to its client-facing assistant, JPMorgan Chase deployed its LLM Suite internally last year, projecting $2 billion in efficiency gains related to AI adoption.
Evident ranked JPMorgan Chase first and Capital One second for AI maturity in September, but others are catching up, according to the Wednesday report.
Goldman Sachs is nearing a 1:2 ratio between AI software implementation technicians and data engineers, the highest ratio among the banks in Evident’s research. The ratio reflects CIO Marco Argenti’s focus on deploying the technology across the company, among bankers, traders and asset managers, as well as coding engineers, Evident said.
Goldman Sachs armed its 12,000 developers with the GitHub Copilot coding assistant last year and has seen efficiency gains of roughly 20%, Argenti told CIO Dive.
“It’s not just about efficiency,” Argenti said. “It’s about rethinking the way we operate.” The bank also equipped 10,000 of its employees with GS AI, a ChatGPT-like tool trained to assist bankers, traders and asset managers in everyday tasks.
As adoption spreads across functions, banks are rolling out training programs to upskill existing staff. Nearly three-quarters of the firms surveyed by Evident provided AI-specific training.
“Increasingly, these efforts are aligned to rollouts of new genAI productivity tools, which often require phased trials by ‘super-users’ or ‘sandboxed’ environments to experiment in a risk-free setting,” Evident said.
