Photographer: Alex Kraus/Bloomberg
No one likes to say they are using artificial intelligence tools to replace workers. But experts say call center jobs and other low-skilled bank labor won’t be around for much longer, as agentic AI progresses.
A potential sign of AI-driven workforce reductions came from Morgan Stanley in March. Several publications
In January,
“AI certainly is going to replace jobs,” Chris McGee, managing director of financial services at AArete, a consulting firm specializing in banking and capital markets. “All industries are experiencing this dynamic shift.”
It’s hard to draw a direct line between investments in AI and reductions in staff, in part because companies are loath to admit they are replacing people with bots and in part because some jobs will change and others will decline through attrition.
Generative AI bots like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini are not job killers, said Steve Mordue, co-founder and CEO of Digital Labor Factory, but agentic AI, such as copilots from Microsoft, Salesforce, Github and others, are. He cited Wells Fargo’s work incorporating the technology into its Fargo virtual assistant.
Call centers are a likely place for agentic AI, which are systems and models that can achieve goals without the need for constant human guidance. “A lot of banks have got very large call centers full of people who just sit there answering questions all day,” Mordue told American Banker. “That’s low-hanging fruit for artificial intelligence.”
Call center representatives won’t necessarily be replaced by ChatGPT or even tailored bots like Bank of America’s Erica and Wells Fargo’s Fargo. But agentic AI that’s built and trained using the bank’s own data and not open to the internet for wrong information, “hallucinations or whatever craziness,” could replace these workers, Mordue said.
“We’re very close to getting to that point where it’s going to answer 99% of customer inquiries and beyond just answering questions, be able to then take actions,” he said. “So going on to the bank’s website and talking to an AI assistant to say things like, ‘I want to transfer money from my savings account to my checking account’ and not have it explain how to do it, but have it actually say, ‘OK, I will do that for you,’ is going to be for banks potentially as earth shaking as ATMs were for the teller side of the house.”
Some of the tasks banks have been offshoring may get done by agentic AI in the future.
“All they’re doing is providing low-cost, low-skill labor to do low-skill positions of repetitive tasks,” Mordue said. “That’s immediately replaceable with AI today.” Agentic AI could be used for things like preparing contracts and doing HR onboarding of new employees.
Loan officers’ jobs will be affected by AI in the next six to 12 months, Mordue said.
“If you apply for a loan, that would all be a series of specialized agents in the background that are just being brought in for whatever that particular task is,” he said.
Not everyone takes the view that AI is going to disappear jobs.
“No technology has ever taken jobs in the long run,” Chris Nichols, director of capital markets at SouthState Bank, told American Banker. “Technology only shifts jobs from one function to others. AI is already creating new opportunities in banking that we never had before while making banks more profitable. As banks become more profitable, we can deploy capital to fuel more jobs in innovation, technology development, improving the customer experience, sales and customer support.”
Backing up this point is data from Evident’s latest report on AI hiring in banks, which was published Wednesday. Among the 50 large banks Evident tracks, from September 2024 to March 2025, the overall number of people working in AI-related roles rose 12.6% — the largest six-month increase Evident has observed since it started covering these banks two years ago.
Wells Fargo and Bank of America are hiring the most developers, according to the report. They’re doing things like enhancing the banks’ virtual assistant apps, Fargo and Erica. Capital One is hiring the most data engineers.
“The threat is not being replaced by AI but with a human that knows AI,” Nichols said. “It’s incumbent upon our industries to train, and hire, with AI skills in mind.”
Mordue also expects the people doing the displaced jobs can be redeployed. “If you have somebody that shows up to work every day on time and does a good job, let’s teach them another job, as opposed to laying them off because we don’t need that role anymore,” he said.
McGee said an example of where this might happen is back-office operations, where AI could be used to handle margin calls, manage collateral, monitor risk and such. But it could also create jobs.
“The idea is, do you still need all those employees in different capacities to drive more insights or help with more change-the-bank activities versus run-the-bank?” he said. “So you can use them in different ways.”
AI in back-office operations could automate tasks to a degree where “employees have freed up time that leaders can now use them in greater change the bank capacities to drive actual transformation where there isn’t a necessity to bring in external staffing and support,” McGee said. “There are positives to being able to free up time to do more meaningful work to focus on other things that perhaps there’s been resource constraints on in the past.”
But in Mordue’s view, agentic AI’s impact on jobs will be greater than any technology development of the past.
“The difference in this one is that it’s going to create far fewer jobs than it eats,” he said.
“Most of the other technologies that came in didn’t eat as many jobs, particularly in the information worker space. This one is going to be a Pac-Man.”