- Wall Street is investing big in AI talent, from data scientists to machine-learning engineers.
- BI collected salary data from 8 Wall Street banks for AI roles across all levels.
- See who's hiring and paying the most at JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Citi, and more.
Wall Street is investing big in artificial intelligence — and that's good news for machine-learning engineers and other tech talent.
Consider JPMorgan Chase, America's largest bank by assets. In a recent letter to investors, CEO and Chairman Jamie Dimon compared the potential disruption of generative AI to that of electricity, the printing press, the steam engine, the computer, and the internet.
Dimon said the firm is getting ready for the AI revolution with its more than 2,000 machine-learning experts. These workers are tackling a range of AI use cases, such as marketing, fraud, and risk — and looking into how the technology can be used for customer service, operations, and software engineering, he said.
"In the future, we envision GenAI helping us reimagine entire business workflows," Dimon said, adding that it could potentially reduce some jobs in the company while also creating new ones. Dimon said he expects the technology to eventually "augment virtually every job" at the financial powerhouse.
JPMorgan is far from the only bank investing heavily in this technological future by hiring reams of artificial-intelligence experts, including machine-learning engineers and data scientists.
Citi's top tech exec recently outlined, in an interview with BI, how the bank's AI roadmap will impact everyone from engineering to operations and wealth. Deutsche Bank, meanwhile, has been on an AI hiring tear as the German bank looks to grow its AI employee base to at least 600, Gil Perez, Deutsche's chief innovation officer, previously told BI. AI is also widely expected to eventually take over many of the tedious tasks now ascribed to junior investment bankers, like editing pitch decks and putting logos on PowerPoints, which stands to make the notoriously competitive field even harder to break into.
The race to harness AI across corporate America has put a premium on talent with relevant AI skills, which means banks will have to shell out more money to compete for the best talent. Some PE firms are offering pay packages up to $2 million for AI execs to implement the tech at portfolio companies, as Business Insider has previously reported. Top AI product managers, for instance, can snag about $100,000 more than standard engineering managers, recruiters told BI.
"We're talking about cream-of-the-crop talent that is seeing a bit of upside to the AI boom," said Giancarlo Hirsch, a managing director at recruitment firm Glocomms, referring to the "inflated range" for compensation. Hirsch said that investment banks are hiring AI engineers to build in-house tools that they can use "across their trading, research, and risk-management functions."
To put Wall Street pay for AI talent in perspective, BI pulled data from the US Office of Foreign Labor Certification's 2023 disclosure data for H1-B and similar visa holders for large investment banks, some of which also have consumer banking divisions, commercial lending divisions, and asset management divisions. The 8 banks reviewed are JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, UBS, Citibank, Barclays, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley.
We pulled data for roles containing keywords like "AI," "data science," "machine learning," and "prompt." We also included any roles tagged with the Department of Labor classification (known as a SOC code) for data scientists. While not every data scientist works directly on artificial intelligence, their work of ensuring integrity across the vast amounts of data these firms collect is an integral part of rolling out advanced machine-learning applications.
This data shows the salaries that Wall Street banks expected to pay foreign data scientists and AI workers in 2023, and its disclosure is part of their visa terms. This data does not include signing or performance bonuses or stock-based compensation, but it is the best publicly available data on base pay at these firms, which are known for doling out big bonuses.
All of the banks either declined to comment or did not respond to a request for comment.
Check out data-science and AI salaries for JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Citi, Bank of America, and other investment banks:
