The “Letter from the Editor” is a biweekly series of exclusive insight and opinion-driven analysis from Tearsheet’s Managing Editor Sara Khairi, connecting ideas, questioning assumptions, and tracking shifts across both mature and emerging trends in financial services.
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Issue # 17
Companies are getting better at explaining which tasks agentic AI can automate and which roles could disappear as a result. But many haven’t given much thought to what happens to the work, and the people left in its wake.
American Express plans to cut roughly 5% of its global workforce as it expands AI across customer service and commerce. Barclays is eliminating about 5,000 jobs while rolling out AI coding tools to its developers. Both companies are changing how work gets done, but are they building a different business or simply a leaner version of the one they already have?
The risk is that a lot of companies get ahead at eliminating work and fall behind at building what replaces it. The consequences may not show up in the quarter when layoffs are announced but could emerge years later as missing skills, lost institutional knowledge, and a shortage of experienced people.
The jobs are changing, and the workforce strategy isn’t that clear
Barclays CEO C.S. Venkatakrishnan said, “We will employ AI at scale, but AI is the icing on the cake, not the cake,” adding context to the AI debate. He was describing AI as one part of a broader transformation involving technology investment, process simplification, and organizational change. But as companies increasingly reorganize around what software can do, their skill requirements will inevitably change. Box CEO Aaron Levie, for example, has identified new AI-related roles at the cloud content management and file-sharing company, including AI architects, model evaluators, and AI business automation engineers.
October data from PYMNTS Intelligence found that AI-related job postings at banks increased 49%, while mentions of agent orchestration jumped 1,721%. Mentions of responsible AI and AI governance rose 657% and 394%, respectively. Banks need people who can connect AI systems to business processes, decide what agents are allowed to do, and handle the exceptions that automation cannot resolve on its own.
So, yes, AI is creating work even as it takes over tasks previously done by people. But a developer whose routine coding work disappears cannot automatically step into an AI governance role. The new jobs may require different skills and experience, and the old ones may disappear before employees have time to acquire them.
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