Bankers frustrated with AI liken their jobs to manual labour
Banks and other financial services firms are certainly eager to implement AI, but it's easier said than done. At Bank of America, implementing NVIDIA's AI enterprise software has been a struggle, according to leaked communications reported by Business Insider.
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Speaking to NVIDIA executives at a conference late last year, Bank of America reportedly likened itself to a local car mechanic trying to operate a Formula 1 car (which, for reference, is not road legal). An NVIDIA spokesperson said that the deployment of the software has since been completed. BofA also reportedly said that its in-house staff lacked machine learning operations (MLOps) skills. Today, just six openings at Bank of America mention MLOps.
Elsewhere in finance, sentiment on AI is mixed. The recent release of Claude for Excel, for example, has faced criticism on X over hallucinations and inaccuracy when performing complex tasks. Ex-Citadel portfolio manager Brett Caughran said that the technology received poor feedback from his buy-side colleagues and is "still quite far from ready for the institutional use case of 3-statement financial modelling." Michael Yuan, an ex-Goldman banker turned AI startup founder, said the technology's approach is "fundamentally flawed" for banking and private equity use cases. An anonymous former hedge fund manager called Claude for Excel a "complete and utter mess."
The evident flaws haven't stopped large enterprises from using AI to cut headcount. Just today, Amazon announced it was cutting 16,000 jobs today after its CEO said last year that AI would lead to automation-induced job losses. The layoffs were first revealed to staff from an email sent in error; perhaps it was scheduled using AI. The technology has been cited by both Citi and Goldman Sachs when making job cuts in recent months
Bank of America's leaked communications suggest that there will be increased appetite for MLOps specialists in banking, perhaps supplanting traditional DevOps engineers. JPMorgan, for example, has ~50 current openings mentioning MLOps, mostly in London and New York. At the high end, a senior MLOps engineer in New York can earn a salary of $260k. However, one AI engineer speaking anonymously via our new forum, The Bubble, said that some hiring managers in banks "aren't able to discern [AI] skills and rely on accreditations."
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