Artificial intelligence is set to make some banking roles “obsolete” in the coming years, Brett King said at the First Abu Dhabi Bank and IMD Competitiveness Summit 2026 in Abu Dhabi, where the language of efficiency sat neatly beside the prospect of fewer human workers. King, a futurist and author, said banks will restructure around “human plus AI operation,” with some employees retrained and others pushed out of roles that “will become more obsolete.”
The State of the Bank, the Fate of the Worker
King told The National on the sidelines of the summit on Monday that “The skill set in banks is going to have dramatically shift towards agentic operation.” He added, “There'll be a lot of new employees in the bank over the next 10 years but they'll all be agents. You are going to restructure from human plus AI operation. Some people within the bank can be retrained to support those roles. Other roles will become more obsolete.” The sentence is doing a lot of work there. Humans get retrained if they fit the machine. If not, they become a line item on the way to “operationally efficient” banking.
King said concerns were growing over job losses across industries as AI use increased globally. In July, Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JP Morgan Chase, said AI had already eliminated 30 to 40 per cent of headcount in some of the bank’s departments, and the company outlined plans to invest about $20 billion in technology this year. In January, Amazon announced 16,000 job cuts worldwide as it expanded the adoption of AI tools for efficient operations. The pattern is plain enough. The bosses call it modernization. The workers get the bill.
King said, “JP Morgan Chase, a couple of years ago, had 160,000 employees globally. By the end of the next decade, by the 2040s, I'd be surprised if they had a few thousand employees.” He also said, “Just understand that 99 per cent of banking can be automated and agentic AI-based capabilities is the way we do that. So, in the agentic world of banking, humans just slow things down and are unproductive.” That’s the logic in its cleanest form: people as friction, machines as discipline, and profit as the only thing worth keeping alive.
Efficiency for Whom?
King said banks would become much more cost effective and much more operationally efficient through AI use, and added that banks were projected to be more profitable as staffing costs went down. For the Mena region, he said, “what's most important is we'll have healthy financial inclusion because the cost of banking goes down and accessibility to financial services improves dramatically.” He added, “Every individual that sits in the middle-income bracket will have access to private banking-style capabilities within a very short period of time through AI.” The promise is familiar: fewer workers, cheaper services, more access. The machine gets praised for opening doors even as it closes them behind the people who used to keep the place running.
At the same summit, Hischam El Agamy, executive director of IMD Business School, said the Middle East and Africa must develop unique banking models rather than replicating western frameworks because of distinct demographic shifts. He said 60 per cent of the world's youth will live in the Mena region by 2024, fuelling rising demand for innovation. The summit’s demographic talk and competitiveness rankings offered the usual managerial comfort: if the region can be measured, ranked and optimized, then the system can be managed. The people inside it are another matter.
Rankings, Bureaucracy and the Human Cost
Speakers also highlighted the UAE’s economic performance and its position in this year's IMD World Competitiveness Ranking report. The UAE was listed as the world's fifth most competitive nation, with the Emirates coming first globally for economic performance, bureaucracy, adaptability of government policy, employment, international experience, national culture and quality of air transport. The UAE was the region's top-ranked country overall in the report, which assessed the performance of 70 countries against 67 criteria. Other countries in the region performed well, with Qatar ranked at 11, Saudi Arabia 13, Bahrain 20, Oman 25 and Kuwait at 31.
The numbers are tidy. The rhetoric is tidy too. What gets left out is the human side of the “efficiency” story: the workers who are told to retrain, the departments that are hollowed out, and the broader labor force that gets treated as expendable once software can do the job faster and cheaper. The summit sold a future of streamlined banking and expanded access. It also described, without much embarrassment, a future where fewer people are needed to make the money machine run.