AI Is Changing the Banking Workforce. The Roster Has to Change With It.

As artificial intelligence reshapes roles and skills across financial services, banks face a larger challenge than adopting new technology: developing the people who will work alongside it.

The conversation about artificial intelligence in banking often begins with technology. Which tasks can be automated? Where can generative AI improve productivity? How quickly can new tools be deployed? What will those investments return?

Increasingly, however, AI is becoming a workforce question.

Banks and other financial institutions are beginning to consider not only how artificial intelligence will change their operations, but what those changes mean for the people performing the work. Some roles will shrink. Others will evolve. New positions will emerge, and skills that once occupied a smaller part of a job may become considerably more important.

That leaves banking leaders with a challenge that cannot be solved by a technology investment alone: What kind of workforce will the next version of banking require, and how much of that workforce can be developed from the people already inside the organization?

Financial Services Leaders Expect Significant Workforce Change

The scale of anticipated change is substantial.

PwC’s 2026 Financial Services Workforce AI Survey gathered responses from 1,004 director-level and above executives at U.S. financial-services firms, with respondents divided among banking and capital markets, asset and wealth management, insurance, and private equity. Nearly eight in ten expect their workforce to shrink by at least 20% during the next five years. Yet reducing headcount is only one part of the workforce question.

PwC found that 62% of financial-services firms plan to hire employees with AI-specific skills in the coming year, while nearly the same share—61%—plan to upskill or reskill existing employees. Ninety-one percent say they are increasing compensation for employees with AI skills.

The findings point toward a workforce that may become smaller in some areas while requiring greater capability in others.

They also complicate the assumption that AI simply reduces the value of human expertise. PwC notes that some AI-affected jobs are becoming more specialized, placing greater emphasis on capabilities such as critical thinking, team-building, and creative problem-solving.

For banking leaders, the issue is therefore larger than deciding which jobs AI can perform. It is determining what people need to be able to do next.

A New Playbook Requires Different Capabilities

Banking has been through this kind of role evolution before.

As digital banking reduced the need for some routine branch transactions, institutions began redesigning frontline positions. McKinsey documented banks reskilling tellers into “universal bankers” with broader sales and service responsibilities, while financial advisers developed new capabilities for delivering advice remotely. Banks also redeployed employees from areas with excess capacity into parts of the organization where talent was needed.

The specific technology has changed, but the leadership question is similar. When the Playbook changes, the organization has to determine whether its Roster has the capabilities required to execute it.

AI makes that question more urgent because it can alter individual tasks without necessarily eliminating the larger role. An employee who spends less time performing repetitive work may have more capacity for customer relationships, analysis, judgment, problem-solving, or oversight of AI-enabled processes. But that transition does not happen automatically.

Removing a low-value task from someone’s workload does not ensure that the freed capacity will become higher-value work. PwC specifically advises financial-services firms to have a deliberate strategy for reallocating the capacity AI creates—whether toward training, stronger customer relationships, or other valuable activities. That is workforce design, not simply automation.

Hiring for the Future Is Only Part of the Answer

Banks will undoubtedly need to recruit people with capabilities they do not currently have. PwC’s findings make clear that financial-services leaders already recognize the market value of AI expertise. But organizations cannot assume that every future capability will be acquired through hiring.

There are practical reasons to develop existing employees. They already understand the institution, its customers, its systems, its regulatory environment, and its culture. Some possess valuable institutional knowledge that would be difficult to reproduce quickly in an external hire. More importantly, existing roles can contain skills that transfer well into new ones.

McKinsey has found that banks can use “skill adjacencies”—capabilities from an employee’s current or previous role that complement the requirements of another—to support reskilling and redeployment. Its banking research also found that redeployment paired with effective reskilling can be more cost-effective than relying primarily on layoffs and new hiring.

This suggests that workforce planning should include more than an inventory of the jobs an institution currently has. Banks also need to understand the capabilities already present within their people and where those capabilities could lead.

Leaders Have to See Who People Can Become

This is where workforce transformation becomes a leadership-development issue. Walter Bond teaches that leaders need to think like coaches. In his description, effective coaches do three things particularly well: they recruit, they develop, and they retain talent. Recruiting matters, but it is only one of the three.

Walter also challenges leaders to speak to people based not only on who they are today, but on who they can become. That distinction is particularly relevant when jobs themselves are changing.

An employee’s current role tells a leader what that person is responsible for today. It does not necessarily reveal the employee’s capacity to operate in a different role, develop AI fluency, manage more complex customer relationships, exercise greater judgment, lead a team, or contribute in an area of the organization that does not yet exist.

A future-ready Roster therefore cannot be built solely by matching people to today’s job descriptions. Leaders need to identify potential, create development pathways, and give employees opportunities to build the capabilities the future Playbook will require.

The Leadership Pipeline Deserves Attention, Too

There is another consequence of AI-driven workforce change that banking leaders should consider: what happens to the leadership pipeline when entry-level roles decline?

PwC found that 30% of financial-services executives identify entry-level positions as the organizational layer most vulnerable to AI disruption. The concern is not simply the loss of those particular jobs. Fewer entry-level employees today can mean a smaller pool of experienced employees from which organizations traditionally develop tomorrow’s managers and leaders. That makes talent development more important, not less.

If the traditional career ladder becomes shorter or less predictable, banks may need to become much more deliberate about identifying high-potential employees, creating new developmental experiences, and preparing people for leadership earlier in their careers.

Technology can change the structure of work. It cannot eliminate the need for succession.

Employee Readiness Cannot Be Assumed

There is also a human reality underneath the workforce models.

PwC found that 44% of financial-services executives report employee concerns about job security or changing roles because of AI. Forty percent say employees feel overwhelmed by the pace of AI-driven change, while 34% identify change fatigue as a barrier to scaling AI throughout the workforce.

Those numbers matter because adoption depends on the people being asked to change. An organization can purchase an AI platform, establish governance policies, and redesign workflows. Employees still need to understand what is changing, why it is changing, what is expected of them, and whether they see a credible place for themselves in the organization’s future.

Training is part of that response, but training alone may not be enough. Coaching, communication, clarity around roles, opportunities to practice new skills, and visible career pathways all influence whether employees view AI as something happening to them or a capability they are being prepared to use.

The Roster needs more than access to the new Playbook. It needs development for the new Playbook.

The Future Workforce Has to Be Built Deliberately

Artificial intelligence will almost certainly change the composition of the banking workforce. Pretending otherwise would serve neither institutions nor their employees. But workforce reduction is not the same thing as workforce strategy.

PwC makes that distinction explicitly, cautioning that workforce reshaping should follow strategy rather than substitute for it. Its research also shows that many organizations have not yet completed the more difficult work of defining future roles, identifying the skills those roles will require, and redesigning talent pipelines accordingly. For banking leaders, that is where the conversation needs to go next.

What work should technology perform? What work becomes more valuable when technology handles the routine? Which capabilities will the bank need from its people? Which employees can grow into those capabilities? And who is responsible for developing them?

The future Roster will include people banks have not hired yet.

But some of its most valuable members may already be there, waiting for leaders who can see not only who they are today, but who they can become.