By Tatiana Bautzer and Prakhar Srivastava

NEW YORK, Dec 9 (Reuters) – U.S. banks, including JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo, said artificial intelligence it will increase the productivity of their companies and probably lead to job losses.

JPMorgan Chase’s head of consumer and community banking, Marianne Lake, told the Goldman Sachs Financial Services Conference that the bank has doubled productivity to 6% with AI, up from 3% without it.

Productivity for operations specialists is expected to grow by 40 percent to 50 percent, Lake said. Higher productivity means fewer net impact jobs, he said.

AI represents the biggest technological change to the global economy since the rise of the Internet.

It has brought trillions of dollars of investment and skyrocketing stock market gains, but also a shortage of memory chips, regulatory scrutiny and growing anxiety about job displacement.

Wells Fargo CEO Charlie Scharf said the bank hasn’t cut headcount, but added that “we’re doing a lot more” because of AI.

“There are other places we can look and figure out how we can do more with less people,” he said.

“It won’t totally replace humans, but it creates an opportunity to do significantly different things.”

PNC Financial CEO Bill Demchak said the bank’s headcount is the same as it was 10 years ago, when the bank was one-third the size, all during the automation and branch optimization process.

“You know, the big gap right now is that it’s going to continue because AI is going to drive it. But we’ve been on an automation journey for years, and AI can be an accelerator,” he said.

“It will certainly be an accelerator in our technology workforce.”

Citigroup’s incoming chief financial officer, Gonzalo Luchetti, said the bank has seen a 9% increase in productivity on the coding front.

“Not only can we increase the self-service ratio, which we’re already seeing and doing with our Gen AI, but we can also attend in real time those calls that end up with a human being and can be more productive,” Luchetti said, referring to the US personal banking unit.

In October, Goldman Sachs informed employees of possible job cuts and a hiring slowdown through the end of the year, according to an internal memo seen by Reuters, as the Wall Street giant looks to use AI to improve productivity.

Calling the initiative “OneGS 3.0,” the memo said some of the priorities of its AI initiative are sales and the customer onboarding process, as well as other critical areas such as loan processes, regulatory reporting and vendor management.