JPMorgan Chase CEO and Chairman Jamie Dimon is sounding the alarm on artificial intelligence and its impact on employment. The banking chief told the audience at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women summit in Washington, D.C., this week AI will ultimately claim thousands of jobs and that anyone who doesn’t believe so is ignoring the inevitable.
“It will eliminate jobs,” said Dimon, speaking in a conversation with Fortune Editor-in-chief Alyson Shontell. “I think people should stop sticking their head in the sand. So did tractors and so did cars.”
And as businesses, governments, and society come together on the same page regarding AI usage, proper regulations and guardrails should be put in place, said Dimon, particularly because it will be the root cause of massive job displacement. Options on the table include upskilling workers for new AI-based tech jobs, providing income assistance, facilitating early retirement, and major retraining, he said.
“You can’t just take all these people and throw them on the street where the next job is, you know, making $30,000 a year when they were making $150,000,” said Dimon. “You’ll have a revolution.”
Despite the tectonic upheaval that is coming to the employment landscape, AI will eventually get better, faster, and cheaper, much like other milestone developments that allowed operations to scale, he said. Therefore, in the meantime, people should get accustomed to using AI and determining the best use cases.
“Underlying the [AI] hype is a real technology that is extremely transformative and powerful,” said Dimon.
The bank has been utilizing AI and machine learning for fraud detection, identifying patterns of behavior, conducting legal analysis, ensuring compliance with regulations, and enhancing business efficiency. JPMorgan has invested about $2 billion in AI and has seen it improve processes and procedures through its own internally developed models. Dimon said merely improving procedures can lead to a drop in headcount but it’s still difficult to quantify how much value there is in saving two hours out of the workday at this point.
Despite those remaining questions, “it’s absolutely time to go” in terms of investing in AI, and reviewing how it is being used at every business in depth. He said the bank has focused on its own training and executives have picked up techniques for document processing, pattern recognition in fraud, and correlating different databases together.
“So, use it. Get good at it,” said Dimon. “Make it part of your tool set and your weapon set.”
