Jamie Dimon drops big hint on JPMorgan's future hiring in the coming years at Davos, Wall Street stalwart says 'you can’t lay off 2 million...'

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, while speaking at the World Economic Forum, also known as the Davos conference, warned that unchecked AI adoption could lead to significant job losses and social instability. The Wall Street mogul asserted "cutting jobs is a bigger social issue than he thinks", stressing the need for phased implementation, retraining, and income support, highlighting that millions of workers cannot be replaced overnight. At Davos, Jamie Dimon highlighted that AI adoption must be phased in carefully and gave the example of US trucking industry, which employs about to million drivers out of which many earn hefty salaries.

A sudden shift to fully autonomous trucks, he said, could leave large sections of the workforce without viable alternatives. “You can’t lay off two million truckers tomorrow,” Dimon noted, calling instead for retraining, redeployment, and income-support measures. He said JPMorgan already has plans to retrain and redeploy employees impacted by automation, adding that he would even support government intervention if it helped prevent sudden, large-scale job losses.

JPMorgan to employ fewer workers in coming years

At a time when workplaces around the world are undergoing an unprecedented revolution due to the Artificial Intelligence, JPMorgan Chase is also not an exception. Jamie Dimon, admitted he’ll likely employ fewer workers in the next five years—but warned that rushing into AI-driven layoffs without safeguards could backfire, potentially triggering “civil unrest.” Instead, the 69-year-old said he would even welcome government restrictions on replacing large numbers of workers with AI. However, long before it reaches that point, he said he already has measures in place to safeguard many of the over 300,000 employees on his payroll.


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“If we have to do that to save society … Society will have more production, we are going to cure a lot of cancers, you’re not going to slow it down. How do you have plans in place if it does something terrible?”

“I have a plan to retrain people, relocate people, income-assist people,” Dimon said. “Phase it in. Retrain.” he said. “You can’t lay off 2 million truckers tomorrow. You can phase it in over time.”

“We would agree—if we have to do that to save society,” he said. “Society will have more production. We’re going to cure a lot of cancers. You’re not going to slow it down. How do you have plans in place to make it work better if it does something terrible?”

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Dimon said companies and governments could not ignore AI or “put your head in the sand”. “Your competitors are going to use it and countries are going to use it,” he said. “However, it may go too fast for society and if it goes too fast for society that’s where governments and businesses [need to] in a collaborative way step in together and come up with a way to retrain people and move it over time.”

However, AI leaders like pioneering computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton said the worst is yet to come. “What’s actually going to happen is rich people are going to use AI to replace workers,” the “Godfather of AI” said last September. “It’s going to create massive unemployment and a huge rise in profits. It will make a few people much richer and most people poorer. That’s not AI’s fault, that is the capitalist system.”