Dimon urges calm over fear about AI’s impact on jobs: ‘Stop being breathless over it’

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon on Wednesday said there is still a lot of uncertainty over how AI will impact the workforce and people shouldn’t be “breathless” in their concerns as new technologies have historically created new jobs.

Dimon said in a conversation with Sen. Dave McCormick, R-Pa., at the Pennsylvania Defense and Innovation Summit that “we don’t really know” about the impact of AI on the workforce as the emerging technology advances.

“I think people should stop being breathless over it. You know, it’s created a lot of jobs in our company, and yeah, there are areas where it’s reduced jobs a little bit,” Dimon said.

“Technology always creates new jobs. The question is going to be if it happens too fast, somehow, people are adopting it too fast and jobs are being lost – middle-class jobs before they could be retrained to replace,” Dimon said.

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“We’re talking about work skills, it’s the exact same thing we should be doing anyway. That is how to fix it,” he added.

“People know, at JPMorgan, we’re going to redeploy our own people. We reskill them, retrain them,” Dimon said. “I think there are fixes for that.”

“I think we’re kind of scaring the whole world much more rapidly than we should about it,” he said.

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The JPMorgan Chase CEO said that based on experience within his company, he thinks “we all have to be more rational in how we use some of this.”

“Here’s the choice: do you save money over here because you know that you can do less, or do you simply want to do faster? I’m kind of, of the mindset, do what I want to do faster, give you better stuff quicker,” Dimon said.

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“So the headcount won’t go down because I want to make you happier, not less happy. So people should just take a deep breath, but the planning should be around jobs – I think that planning will protect us against too rapid job loss from AI if, in fact, it ever happened,” he added.