Job Cuts Driven by A.I. Are Rising on Wall Street

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Job Cuts Driven by A.I. Are Rising on Wall Street

“A.I. gives us places to go we haven’t gone,” said one bank’s chief executive.

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Brian T. Moynihan, Bank of America’s chief executive, said “eliminating work and applying technology” helped the bank shed 1,000 jobs last quarter.

Credit...

Charles Krupa/Associated Press

By

Rob Copeland

Rob Copeland is a finance reporter based in New York.

April 21, 2026,

11:27 a.m. ET

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Less than four months ago, the chief executive of Bank of America, 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 ago — 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 in Silicon Valley

, few major financial figures are stating outright that A.I. is eliminating jobs.

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