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Hybrid jobs: How AI is rewriting work in finance

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Artificial intelligence (AI) is not destroying jobs in finance, it is rewriting them. As models begin to handle underwriting, compliance, and asset allocation, the traditional architecture of financial work is undergoing a fundamental shift.

This is not about coders replacing bankers. It is about a sector where knowing how the model works—what it sees and how it reasons—becomes the difference between making and automating decisions. It is also about the decline of traditional credentials and the rise of practical experience and critical judgement as key assets in a narrowing workforce.

In what follows, we explore how the rise of generative AI and autonomous systems is reshaping the financial workforce: Which roles are fading, which ones are emerging, and how institutions—and policymakers—can bridge the looming talent divide.

The cognitive turn in finance

For decades, financial expertise was measured in credentials such as MBAs (Master of Business Administration) and CFAs (Chartered Financial Analysts). But AI is shifting the terrain. Models now read earnings reports, classify regulatory filings, flag suspicious transactions, and even propose investment strategies. And its capability is getting better—faster, cheaper, and more scalable than any human team.

This transformation is not just a matter of tasks being automated; it is about the cognitive displacement of middle-office work. Where human judgment once shaped workflows, we now see black-box logic making calls. The financial worker is not gone, but their job has changed. Instead of crunching numbers, they are interpreting outputs. Instead of producing reports, they are validating the ones AI generates.

The result is a new division of labor—one that rewards hybrid capabilities over siloed specialization. In this environment, the most valuable professionals are not those with perfect models, but those who know when not to trust them.

Market signals

This shift is no longer speculative. Industry surveys and early adoption data point to a fast-moving frontier.

  • McKinsey (2025) reports that while only 1% of organizations describe their generative AI deployments as mature, 92% plan to increase their investments over the next three years.
  • The World Economic Forum emphasizes that AI is already reshaping core business functions in financial services—from compliance to customer interaction to risk modeling.
  • Brynjolfsson et al. (2025) demonstrate that generative AI narrows performance gaps between junior and senior workers on cognitively demanding tasks. This has direct implications for talent hierarchies, onboarding, and promotion pipelines in financial institutions.

Leading financial institutions are advancing from experimental to operational deployment of generative AI. Goldman Sachs has introduced its GS AI Assistant across the firm, supporting employees in tasks such as summarizing complex documents, drafting content, and performing data analysis. This internal tool reflects the firm’s confidence in GenAI’s capability to enhance productivity in high stakes, regulated environments. Meanwhile, JPMorgan Chase has filed a trademark application for “IndexGPT,” a generative AI tool designed to assist in selecting financial securities and assets tailored to customer needs.

These examples are part of a broader wave of experimentation. According to IBM’s 2024 Global Banking and Financial Markets study, 80% of financial institutions have implemented generative AI in at least one use case, with higher adoption rates observed in customer engagement, risk management, and compliance functions.

The human factor

These shifts are not confined to efficiency gains or operational tinkering. They are already changing how careers in finance are built and valued. Traditional markers of expertise—like time on desk or mastery of rote processes—are giving way to model fluency, critical reasoning, and the ability to collaborate with AI systems. In a growing number of roles, being good at your job increasingly means knowing how and when to override the model.

Klarna offers a telling example of what this transition looks like in practice. By 2024, the Swedish fintech reported that 87% of its employees now use generative AI in daily tasks across domains like compliance, customer support, and legal operations. However, this broad adoption was not purely additive: The company had previously laid off 700 employees due to automation but subsequently rehired in redesigned hybrid roles that require oversight, interpretation, and contextual judgment. The episode highlights not just the efficiency gains of AI, but also its limits—and the enduring need for human input where nuance, ethics, or ambiguity are involved.

The bottom line? AI does not eliminate human input—it changes where it is needed and how it adds value.

New roles, new skills

As job descriptions evolve, so does the definition of financial talent. Excel is no longer a differentiator. Python is fast becoming the new Excel. But technical skills alone will not cut it. The most in demand profiles today are those that speak both AI and finance, and can move between legal, operational, and data contexts without losing the plot.

Emerging roles reflect this shift: model risk officers who audit AI decisions; conversational system trainers who finetune the behavior of large language models (LLMs); product managers who orchestrate AI pipelines for advisory services; and compliance leads fluent in prompt engineering.

For many institutions, the bigger challenge is not hiring this new talent—it is retraining the workforce they already have. Middle office staff, operations teams, even some front office professionals now face a stark reality: Reskill or risk being functionally sidelined.

But reinvention is possible—and already underway. Forward-looking institutions are investing in internal AI academies, pairing domain experts with technical mentors and embedding cross-functional teams that blur the lines between business, compliance, and data science.

At Morgan Stanley, financial advisors are learning to work alongside GPT-4-powered copilots trained on proprietary knowledge. At BNP Paribas, Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) analysts use GenAI to synthesize sprawling unstructured data. At Klarna, multilingual support agents have been replaced—not entirely by AI—but by hybrid teams that supervise and retrain it.

Non-technological barriers to automation: The human frontier

Despite the rapid pace of automation, there remain important limits to what AI can displace—and they are not just technical. Much of the critical decisionmaking in finance depends on tacit knowledge: The unspoken, experience-based intuition that professionals accumulate over years. This kind of knowledge is hard to codify and even harder to replicate in generative systems trained on static data.

Tacit knowledge is not simply a nice-to-have. It is often the glue that binds together fragmented signals, the judgment that corrects for outliers, the intuition that warns when something “doesn’t feel right.” This expertise lives in memory, not in manuals. As such, AI systems that rely on past data to generate probabilistic predictions may lack precisely the cognitive friction—the hesitations, corrections, and exceptions—that make human decisionmaking robust in complex environments like finance.

Moreover, non-technological barriers to automation range from cultural resistance to ethical concerns, from regulatory ambiguity to the deeply embedded trust networks on which financial decisions still depend. For example, clients may resist decisions made solely by an AI model, particularly in areas like wealth management or risk assessment.

These structural frictions offer not just constraints but breathing room: A window of opportunity to rethink education and training in finance. Instead of doubling down on technical specialization alone, institutions should be building interdisciplinary fluency—where practical judgment, ethical reasoning, and model fluency are taught in tandem.

Policy implications: Avoid a two-tier financial workforce

Without coordinated action, the rise of AI could bifurcate the financial labor market into two castes: Those who build, interpret, and oversee intelligent systems, and those who merely execute what those systems dictate. The first group thrives. The second stagnates.

To avoid this divide, policymakers and institutions must act early by:

  • Promoting baseline AI fluency across the financial workforce, not just in specialist roles.
  • Supporting mid-career re-skilling with targeted tax incentives or public-private training programs.
  • Auditing AI systems used in HR to ensure fair hiring and avoid algorithmic entrenchment of bias.
  • Incentivizing hybrid education programs that bridge finance, data science, and regulatory knowledge.

The goal is not to slow down AI; rather, it is to ensure that the people inside financial institutions are ready for the systems they are building.

The future of finance is not a contest between humans and machines. It is a contest between institutions that adapt to a hybrid cognitive environment and those that cling to legacy hierarchies while outsourcing judgment to systems they cannot explain.

In this new reality, cognitive arbitrage is the new alpha. The edge does not come from knowing the answers; it comes from knowing how the model got them and when it is wrong.

The next generation of financial professionals will not just speak the language of money. They will speak the language of models, ethics, uncertainty, and systems.

And if they do not, someone—or something else—will.



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Ramp Debuts AI Agents Designed for Company Controllers

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Financial operations platform Ramp has debuted its first artificial intelligence (AI) agents.

The new offering is designed for controllers, helping them to automatically enforce company expense policies, block unauthorized spending, and stop fraud, and is the first in a series of agents slated for release this year, the company said in a Thursday (July 10) news release.

“Finance teams are being asked to do more with less, yet the function remains largely manual,” Ramp said in the release. “Teams using legacy platforms today spend up to 70% of their time on tasks like expense review, policy enforcement, and compliance audits. As a result, 59% of professionals in controllership roles report making several errors each month.”

Ramp says its controller-centric agents solve these issues by doing away with redundant tasks, and working autonomously to go over expenses and enforce policy, applying “context-aware, human-like” reasoning to manage entire workflows on their own.

“Unlike traditional automation that relies on basic rules and conditional logic, these agents reason and act on behalf of the finance team, working independently to enforce spend policies at scale, immediately prevent violations, and continuously improve company spending guidelines,” the release added.

PYMNTS wrote earlier this week about the “promise of agentic AI,” systems that not only generate content or parse data, but move beyond passive tasks to make decisions, initiate workflows and even interact with other software to complete projects.

“It’s AI not just with brains, but with agency,” that report said.

Industries including finance, logistics and healthcare are using these tools for things like booking meetings, processing invoices or managing entire workflows autonomously.

But although some corporate leaders might hold lofty views for autonomous AI, the latest PYMNTS Intelligence in the June 2025 CAIO Report, “AI at the Crossroads: Agentic Ambitions Meet Operational Realities,” shows a trust gap among executives when it comes to agentic AI that highlights serious concerns about accountability and compliance.

“However, full-scale enterprise adoption remains limited,” PYMNTS wrote. “Despite growing capabilities, agentic AI is being deployed in experimental or limited pilot settings, with the majority of systems operating under human supervision.”

But what makes mid-market companies uneasy about tapping into the power of autonomous AI? The answer is strategic and psychological, PYMNTS added, noting that while the technological potential is enormous, the readiness of systems (and humans) is much murkier.

“For AI to take action autonomously, executives must trust not just the output, but the entire decision-making process behind it. That trust is hard to earn — and easy to lose,” PYMNTS wrote, noting that the research “found that 80% of high-automation enterprises cite data security and privacy as their top concern with agentic AI.”



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How automation is using the latest technology across various sectors

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Artificial Intelligence and automation are often used interchangeably. While the technologies are similar, the concepts are different. Automation is often used to reduce human labor for routine or predictable tasks, while A.I. simulates human intelligence that can eventually act independently.

“Artificial intelligence is a way of making workers more productive, and whether or not that enhanced productivity leads to more jobs or less jobs really depends on a field-by-field basis,” said senior advisor Gregory Allen with the Wadhwani A.I. center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Past examples of automation, such as agriculture, in the 1920s, roughly one out of every three workers in America worked on a farm. And there was about 100 million Americans then. Fast forward to today, and we have a country of more than 300 million people, but less than 1% of Americans do their work on a farm.”

A similar trend happened throughout the manufacturing sector. At the end of the year 2000, there were more than 17 million manufacturing workers according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor statistics and the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. As of June, there are 12.7 million workers. Research from the University of Chicago found, while automation had little effect on overall employment, robots did impact the manufacturing sector. 

“Tractors made farmers vastly more productive, but that didn’t result in more farming jobs. It just resulted in much more productivity in agriculture,” Allen said.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE DRIVES DEMAND FOR ELECTRIC GRID UPDATE

Researchers are able to analyze the performance of Major League Baseball pitchers by using A.I. algorithms and stadium camera systems. (University of Waterloo / Fox News)

According to our Fox News Polling, just 3% of voters expressed fear over A.I.’s threat to jobs when asked about their first reaction to the technology without a listed set of responses. Overall, 43% gave negative reviews while 26% reacted positively.

Robots now are being trained to work alongside humans. Some have been built to help with household chores, address worker shortages in certain sectors and even participate in robotic sporting events.

The most recent data from the International Federation of Robotics found more than 4 million robots working in factories around the world in 2023. 70% of new robots deployed that year, began work alongside humans in Asia. Many of those now incorporate artificial intelligence to enhance productivity.

“We’re seeing a labor shortage actually in many industries, automotive, transportation and so on, where the older generation is going into retirement. The middle generation is not interested in those tasks anymore and the younger generation for sure wants to do other things,” Arnaud Robert with Hexagon Robotics Division told Reuters.

Hexagon is developing a robot called AEON. The humanoid is built to work in live industrial settings and has an A.I. driven system with special intelligence. Its wheels help it move four times faster than humans typically walk. The bot can also go up steps while mapping its surroundings with 22 sensors.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE FUELS BIG TECH PARTNERSHIPS WITH NUCLEAR ENERGY PRODUCERS

gif of AI rendering of pitching throwing a ball

Researchers are able to create 3D models of pitchers, which athletes and trainers could study from multiple angles. (University of Waterloo)

“What you see with technology waves is that there is an adjustment that the economy has to make, but ultimately, it makes our economy more dynamic,” White House A.I. and Crypto Czar David Sacks said. “It increases the wealth of our economy and the size of our economy, and it ultimately improves productivity and wages.”

Driverless cars are also using A.I. to safely hit the road. Waymo uses detailed maps and real-time sensor data to determine its location at all times.

“The more they send these vehicles out with a bunch of sensors that are gathering data as they drive every additional mile, they’re creating more data for that training data set,” Allen said.

Even major league sports are using automation, and in some cases artificial intelligence. Researchers at the University of Waterloo in Canada are using A.I. algorithms and stadium camera systems to analyze Major League Baseball pitcher performance. The Baltimore Orioles joint-funded the project called Pitchernet, which could help improve form and prevent injuries. Using Hawk-Eye Innovations camera systems and smartphone video, researchers created 3D models of pitchers that athletes and trainers could study from multiple angles. Unlike most video, the models remove blurriness, giving a clearer view of the pitcher’s movements. Researchers are also exploring using the Pitchernet technology in batting and other sports like hockey and basketball.

ELON MUSK PREDICTS ROBOTS WILL OUTSHINE EVEN THE BEST SURGEONS WITHIN 5 YEARS

graphic overview of ptichernet system of baseball player's pitching skills

Overview of a PitcherNet System graphics analyzing a pitcher’s baseball throw. (University of Waterloo)

The same technology is also being used as part of testing for an Automated Ball-Strike System, or ABS. Triple-A minor league teams have been using the so-called robot umpires for the past few seasons. Teams tested both situations in which the technology called every pitch and when it was used as challenge system. Major League Baseball also began testing the challenge system in 13 of its spring training parks across Florida and Arizona this February and March.

Each team started a game with two challenges. The batter, pitcher and catcher were the only players who could contest a ball-strike call. Teams lost a challenge if the umpire’s original call was confirmed. The system allowed umpires to keep their jobs, while strike zone calls were slightly more accurate. According to MLB, just 2.6% of calls were challenged throughout spring training games that incorporated ABS. 52.2% of those challenges were overturned. Catchers had the highest success rate at 56%, followed by batters at 50% and pitchers at 41%.

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Triple-A announced last summer it would shift to a full challenge system. MLB commissioner Rob Manfred said in June, MLB could incorporate the automated system into its regular season as soon as 2026. The Athletic reports, major league teams would use the same challenge system from spring training, with human umpires still making the majority of the calls.

Many companies across other sectors agree that machines should not go unsupervised.

“I think that we should always ensure that AI remains under human control,” Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith said.  “One of first proposals we made early in 2023 was to insure that A.I., always has an off switch, that it has an emergency brake. Now that’s the way high-speed trains work. That’s the way the school buses, we put our children on, work. Let’s ensure that AI works this way as well.”



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Artificial intelligence predicts which South American cities will disappear by 2100

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The effects of global warming and climate change are being felt around the world. Extreme weather events are expected to become more frequent from droughts to floods wreaking havoc on communities as well as blistering heatwaves and bone-chilling cold snaps.

While these will affect localized areas temporarily, one inescapable consequence of the increasing temperatures for costal communities around the globe is rising sea levels. This phenomenon will have even more far-reaching effects, displacing hundreds of millions of people as coastal communities are inundated by water, some permanently.

These South American cities will disappear

While there is no doubt that sea levels will rise, predicting exactly how much they will in any given location is a tricky business. This is because oceans don’t rise uniformly as more water is added to the total volume.

However, according to models from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) the most optimistic scenario is between 11 inches and almost 22 inches, if we can curb carbon emissions and keep the temperature rise to 1.5C by 2050. The worst case scenario would be 6 and a half feet by the end of the century.

Caracol Radio in Colombia asked various artificial intelligence systems which cities in South America would disappear due to rising sea levels within the next 200 years. These are the ones most at risk according to their findings:

  • Santos, Brazil
  • Macaió, Brazil
  • Floreanópolis, Brazil
  • Mar de Plata, Argentina
  • Barranquilla, Colombia
  • Lima, Peru
  • Cartagena, Colombia
  • Paramaribo, Surinam
  • Georgetown, Guayana

The last two will be underwater by the end of the century according to modeling done by the non-profit Climate Central along with numerous other communities in low-lying coastal areas.

Their simulator only makes forecasts until the year 2100 as the above image shows for the areas along the northeastern coast of South America including Paramaribo and Georgetown.

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