NEW YORK — JPMorgan Chase moved Saturday to flesh out the workforce strategy outlined by CEO Jamie Dimon earlier this week, publishing a structured plan that signals a significant shift in the bank's hiring priorities toward artificial intelligence engineers, data scientists, and machine learning specialists at the expense of traditional analyst and back-office banking roles.

Dimon, speaking to Bloomberg on Wednesday, said the bank would hire fewer conventional bankers and redirect recruitment budgets toward what he called 'AI people' — a phrase that reverberated across Wall Street and drew immediate scrutiny from labour economists and financial industry trade groups. The Saturday release, shared via JPMorgan's investor relations portal and distributed to staff internally, provides the first concrete staffing numbers attached to that ambition.

According to the plan, JPMorgan intends to add roughly 2,000 AI and data engineering roles globally over the next 18 months, with concentrations in New York, London, and Bengaluru. Simultaneously, the bank confirmed it would not backfill a portion of attrition-driven vacancies in its consumer and investment banking divisions, effectively shrinking those headcounts without formal layoffs. A retraining initiative, developed in partnership with Coursera and internal JPMorgan learning platforms, will offer existing employees pathways into AI-adjacent functions.

The announcement drew a measured but pointed response from the Financial Services Union, which called for greater transparency around which roles face effective elimination and urged regulators at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to assess systemic risk implications of AI-dependent decision-making in credit and trading functions. Competitor banks including Goldman Sachs and Citigroup declined to comment directly, though analysts at Morgan Stanley noted in a Saturday research note that the JPMorgan disclosure was likely to accelerate similar announcements across the sector.

Industry observers noted that Dimon's remarks and the subsequent plan reflect a broader inflection point for large financial institutions grappling with the productivity gains promised by large language models and agentic AI tools now being piloted across trading floors and compliance departments. 'JPMorgan is not doing anything the industry hasn't been quietly planning,' said one fintech analyst briefed on the document. 'Dimon just said it out loud, and now they have to show the numbers.'