Similar restructuring is mounting across the industry, with top banks such as Bank of America and Wells Fargo making explicit statements about their ability to redeploy or reduce workforces.

This shift creates a new challenge to the way firms build institutional knowledge. People used to enter the floor, book tickets, and spend years moving through the asset lifecycle, learning what happened at each step in equities, rates, structured products, or credit. Expert operators were the reliable resources who could diagnose a break at 4 PM when a clearinghouse pushed back an exception.

Now, the emphasis is shifting to AI fluency as a baseline hiring requirement. The thinking goes that if you bring in people who already understand agentic processes, you can train them on the asset lifecycle fundamentals that define things like trade capture, affirmation, settlement instructions, or the specifics of a structured product versus a rate instrument.

The operational infrastructure those programs are building, function by function, looks like urban planners trying to deal with aging water and power grids while planning for “smart city” analytics and the automation of resources.

Reaching the bedrock

Disruption aside, AI is also providing an unexpected advantage in addressing some of transformation’s stickiest and deepest problems. Banks carry core processing infrastructure that has been in production since the 1980s and 1990s, running critical functions that no modernization roadmap has been able to replace reliably. AI can help with those “untouchable” systems that seem too embedded, too expensive to analyze, and too risk-laden to replace.

Many of those bedrock systems run on mainframes or other legacy application architectures. That helps explain why sell-side firms continue to invest in legacy modernization. A 2025 Celent study found that 68% of firms plan to replace or significantly upgrade critical systems in 2025.ⁱⁱ A recent announcement from Anthropic showed how AI can upend the planning assumptions behind modernization, referring to the continued use of COBOL within banks. AI may accelerate transformation that previously seemed too challenging to undertake.