Evident: at some banks, about 40% of all open job roles are AI-related; JPMorgan advertised 3,651 AI-related roles from February 2023 through April 2023
Deutsche Bank AG is using artificial intelligence to scan wealthy client portfolios. ING Group NV is screening for potential defaulters.
Context & Ripple Effects
This mid-2023 snapshot caught the front edge of banking's AI labor shift: at some banks roughly 40% of all open roles were already AI-related, with JPMorgan alone advertising 3,651 such positions in three months, while Deutsche Bank put AI to work scanning wealthy-client portfolios and ING screened for potential defaulters.
The hires turned out to be the leading indicator, not the end state. Later coverage shows both halves of the trade-off playing out — US companies added 640K AI-related jobs from 2023 to 2025 even as a survey warned global banks could cut up to 200K jobs over three to five years as AI absorbs the tasks those new hires are building. Deutsche Bank's move to agentic AI built with Google Cloud shows how far the deployments have traveled since the portfolio-scanning days.
First-order effects
- Banks like JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank, and ING are locked in a direct contest for scarce AI talent, pushing compensation and internal mobility toward candidates who can ship models rather than run branches.
Second-order effects
- AI vendors and cloud providers become gatekeepers to banking workflows — Deutsche Bank's later turn to Google Cloud for compliance monitoring shows banks outsourcing capability they once tried to hire entirely in-house.
Third-order effects
- If hiring-for-AI coincides with cutting-for-AI, bank employment structurally shifts from operational headcount to a smaller core of model builders and overseers, making workforce size a worse proxy for bank capacity than compute and data access.
The trend: Banking's AI build-out is replacing labor with capability — banks hire AI specialists at record rates while simultaneously planning the largest headcount reductions in years.