Beware finance bros: AI is coming for banking before any other kinds of jobs, Citigroup warns

AI will “profoundly change money,” the 124-page report declares in its introductory paragraph. Sure, it creates “new opportunities for growth and innovation, often improving our overall quality of life,” Citigroup says. But it also “destroys” and creates plenty of “losers.” 

Wall Street bankers might just be chief among them. Nearly seven in 10 banking jobs (67%) have “higher potential” to be changed or even fully outsourced by AI, Citigroup wrote, drawing on data from Accenture and the World Economic Forum. That’s the highest share of any job they studied. Industries following just behind are insurance, software, and capital markets. (Perhaps to be expected, utilities and natural resources round out the bottom of the list.)

“Traditional AI adoption in financial services [is] widespread, shallow, and inconsequential,” Shameek Kundu, chief strategy officer and head of financial services at AI observability platform TruEra, wrote in the report.

The good news, however, is that AI implementation more broadly stands to hugely benefit banks and financial institutions. It may not even hurt total headcount, once requisite AI-related management hires are accounted for. 

After all, AI is hardly sophisticated enough at this stage to operate independently. A “bot-powered world,” as Citigroup puts it, would still struggle with compliance, data security, and basic ethics, as “AI models are known to hallucinate and create information that does not exist.” Hardly a minor business risk. 

Indeed, AI could add $170 billion to the profit pool for the banking sector globally by 2028. And the banks know it, even if they’re hesitant to deploy the technology. Almost all (93%) of financial institution respondents to a recent Citi client survey said AI adoption would improve their profitability in the next five years—mainly because of its ability to automate rote tasks human workers are currently saddled with, like data entry and dreaded Excel files. 

Despite the measurable upside—which many other industries have long since embraced—Citigroup predicts financial services will be dragging its feet, slow on the AI uptake compared with other sectors. Citigroup chalks that up to the sector’s “highly regulated nature” and lack of globally agreed-upon rules. “Bankers may think that they lead the way,” Citigroup writes, “but many users are adopting technology faster than banks or big business,” a phenomenon it characterizes as “the crowds running ahead of the crown.”