Interest in and hype around advanced artificial intelligence remains high — so much so that the Pope warned about AI-based decisions at the G7 meeting late last week.
"We need to ensure and safeguard a space for proper human control over the choices made by artificial intelligence programmes: human dignity itself depends on it," Pope Francis said at the meeting in Fasano, Italy, on Thursday.
Yet in the banking industry, hiring of AI experts has been slow in recent months. Banks hired 37% fewer people for AI jobs in the first quarter of 2024 compared to the first quarter of 2023, according to new research from
These findings jibe with a
"Very few banks indicate they are accelerating hiring to support AI initiatives at this time," the report stated. "Only 18% of respondents say their organization is willing to pay more for employees with AI fluency or skills at the moment."
But according to Evident's June AI Dispatch, banks have resumed their quest to hire AI talent and are posting record numbers of ads for such jobs.
Why AI hiring dropped
There are a few reasons for the slump in AI hiring, the Evident researchers said. One is that overall hiring in the sector has been down over the past year due to cost cuts resulting in layoffs.
Another is that when OpenAI made ChatGPT live on November 7, 2022, it inspired a burst of hiring for AI jobs.
"I think there was an 'oh my goodness moment,'" said Alexandra Mousavizadeh, CEO of Evident. "We're going to need prompt engineers and model engineers and we're going to need DevOps and we're going to need machine learning experts. We're going to just hire away."
Then came a lull of uncertainty and a period of working to centralize systems, get the right data in place and test popular AI models like ChatGPT to figure out which ones would be a good fit, she said.
"There was a sense of, we're not actually going to do much externally in terms of hiring or creating new partnerships because we just don't know quite yet where we are," Mousavizadeh said.
Hiring is on the rise
AI hiring is ticking back up in the industry. It was 12% higher in the first quarter of this year compared to the fourth quarter of 2023, and that trend is continuing.
"Banks have gone through prototyping, piloting, testing, generative AI use cases and working out what skills do we need and seeing what we have in house," said Mousavizadeh. "And that is now picking up. So the leading banks are hiring for what we call implementation talent," people who are able to put ideas into production.
JPMorgan Chase and Capital One currently lead in AI hiring. JPMorgan Chase posted ads for 4,000 AI-related jobs between October 2023 and April 2024; Capital One posted about 1,500 during that time period and Citi just under 1,000. (The three banks did not respond to requests for comment.) These three banks and Wells Fargo already lead in AI talent, Mousavizadeh said. JPMorgan Chase has 13,000 people working on AI, 1,200 of whom were added in in the last six months. Wells Fargo has about 7,000 people with AI expertise, 6,600 joined in the last six months.
These banks are hiring a lot of recent college graduates — 62% of recent AI hires are fresh out of school. A relatively small 13% of new AI hires were poached from other banks; 19% were recruited from other industries.
Some of the newly hired college graduates have doctorates, Mousavizadeh said. Banks are trying to hire top AI experts for all their lines of business, she said. "They could come with a general understanding of AI," she said. "They could come with specific expertise in neural networks, deep learning or whatever it might be."
The quest for AI talent is unlikely to stop any time soon.
"There's definitely an intensification, there's a lot of discussion about salaries going up and a lot of demand and a ton of supply," Mousavizadeh said.
