Citi is starting a new AI training program aimed at teaching hundreds of thousands of employees how to write better prompts to feed the bank’s generative AI programs.
In an internal memo shared with American Banker, Tim Ryan, Citi’s head of technology and business enablement, and Anand Selva, the bank’s chief operating officer, spotlighted the need for well-written prompts and introduced a mandatory AI training for the majority of its workforce. The memo was sent to 175,000 employees in 80 locations, American Banker reported on Tuesday. The global bank had around 229,000 employees as of the fourth quarter of last year.
A Citi representative told Fortune confirmed that the training is meant to improve AI prompting among its workforce.
“This training is about teaching our colleagues the possibilities of great prompting versus basic prompting to generate impactful results,” Peter Fox, head of learning at Citi, told Fortune. The module uses an adaptive learning platform that tailors the training based on an employee’s knowledge level, he added. “Experts can complete it in under 10 minutes, while beginners take about 30 minutes.”
Citi reported widespread employee engagement with AI technology in the memo, saying so far this year, employees have entered more than 6.5 million prompts in its built-in tools.
“Just as the right question in a client pitch can reveal clarity and create advantage, a well-crafted prompt can accelerate your work, surface insights and amplify your impact,” Ryan and Selva said in the company memo, according to American Banker.
Experts tell Fortune the democratization of AI skills among workers is a major cultural shift in banking and other white-collar industries.
“People may wonder if they will become expendable,” Christina Muller, workplace mental health expert and consultant at R3 Continuum, a national HR and workplace behavioral health agency, told Fortune. “Training is crucial to reinforce that AI is meant to be a co-pilot—not a replacement—on an already flying plane.”
Citi’s training announcement comes a week after Accenture CEO Jule Sweet said her company was exiting employees unable to reskill with the new tech. Similarly, Walmart CEO Doug McMillon recently said AI would affect “virtually every job” at the global retailer.
Citi’s widescale adoption of AI is “turning work that once took hours into tasks done in minutes,” the internal memo said. “The scale isn’t just impressive; it marks the beginning of a new way of working.”
Mandating AI training is a useful starting point, but by itself, it won’t create meaningful results in the financial industry, Gary Lamach, SVP of strategy and growth at ELB Learning, a company that provides businesses with software professional services, told Fortune.
“Too many organizations are treating AI as a box to check, launching a tool or rolling out a one-time training, and calling it transformation,” Lamach added. “That’s when implementation fails.”
Citi’s mandatory AI prompt training is part of a “continuous upskilling process we’re offering all employees,” Citi’s Fox said. The company is offering additional training for employees to learn more about AI in general.
Many of Citi’s competitors have already been banking on AI training investments.
JPMorgan has made AI training a mandatory part of onboarding for all new employees since 2024, including prompt engineering and AI tool literacy. Bank of America reported in April more than 90% of its 213,000-strong global workforce leverages AI tools in daily work, driven by both voluntary and required training modules across departments. And Wells Fargo trained 4,000 employees in Stanford’s Human-Centered AI program.
In early 2024,Wells Fargo CIO Chintan Mehta said the company’s virtual assistant app, Fargo, had handled 20 million interactions since its launch in March 2023, adding that the AI application could have the potential to handle 100 million or more per year as the technology develops.
But Lamach said the technologies are as good as the people that steer them. Continued investment in people is what separates businesses with AI implementation on a checklist and companies that will guide their employees in the new reality of work, he added.
“The future of finance will not be defined by the tools themselves, but by the leaders who empower their people to use them with purpose,” Lamach said.
