#621
AI Giveth Jobs, and AI Taketh Them Away

If AI is supposed to be a job destroyer, someone forgot to tell Wall Street’s HR department. In a new Bloomberg survey published this week, roughly two-thirds of senior financial-services executives say they expect their headcount to rise over the next three years as they roll out AI. More than 70% also expect AI to raise operating costs in the near term, as banks shovel money into infrastructure, compliance and specialist talent. For now, the future of work on Wall Street looks suspiciously like the present of work - just with even more dashboards and bigger cloud bills.

Behind the scenes, the Street is frantically rearranging its data closets. This week, firms Moelis and Houlihan Lokey announced they are stitching together nearly two decades of deal history into AI-ready datasets, both to sharpen their own advice and, in some cases, to sell back to clients. Moelis is openly wrestling with whether all this automation will eventually mean fewer junior bankers, while at the same time hiring its largest analyst class ever. Everyone agrees productivity will soar; nobody quite agrees on what they’ll ultimately do with the productivity surplus.

Stepping away from Wall Street, the narrative looks less rosy-pink and more pink-slip. In London, Clifford Chance recently cut 10% of its back-office staff explicitly citing increased reliance on AI, while PwC’s global chairman admitted last month that the firm no longer expects to hire the 100,000 people it once planned, because “the world… is different” now that AI has arrived. All-in, outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas published a report stating AI was directly tied to 6,280 layoffs in November and has been cited for 54,694 so far this year in the US.

For now, we appear to be entering a messy transition phase less about how many people are employed than which people. While low-skilled administrative and repetitive roles face an existential threat from automation, the current reality for many enterprises is a paradoxical increase in spending to buy the capacity to run a faster, more complex race. In the long run, the C-suite must decide whether to plough the productivity gains into a growth agenda, or hire less. If the history of technology is any guide, previous productivity tools like spreadsheets and the internet didn't shrink staff; they increased the expectations for output and service. For now, AI continues to rewrite the job description in a notably upskilled font.