Artificial intelligence will render thousands of banking jobs "obsolete" within the next decade, warned futurist Brett King at a major Abu Dhabi summit on Monday, as the industry's embrace of automation threatens to reshape employment across the Middle East and beyond.
King, speaking at the First Abu Dhabi Bank and IMD Competitiveness Summit 2026, said banks are restructuring toward "agentic operation" — AI systems that work autonomously with minimal human oversight. "There'll be a lot of new employees in the bank over the next 10 years but they'll all be agents," he told The National. "Some people within the bank can be retrained to support those roles. Other roles will become more obsolete."
The Human Cost of Efficiency
The shift is already underway at the world's largest financial institutions. In July, Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JP Morgan Chase, revealed that AI had already eliminated 30 to 40 per cent of headcount in some of the bank's departments. 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.
King's projections are stark. "JP Morgan Chase, a couple of years ago, had 160,000 employees globally," he said. "By the end of the next decade, by the 2040s, I'd be surprised if they had a few thousand employees." He added, "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."
The language is blunt, and the implications for workers are clear. While King acknowledged that "some people within the bank can be retrained," he offered no specifics on how many could transition successfully or what happens to those who can't. Concerns are growing over job losses across industries as the use of AI increases globally.
Financial Inclusion or Exclusion?
King argued that AI-driven banking would deliver benefits beyond corporate balance sheets. Banks would become "much more cost effective and much more operationally efficient," he said, adding that they're projected to be more profitable as staffing costs go 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." It's a promise that depends on whether displaced workers can find new employment and whether lower banking costs actually translate to broader access — questions the summit didn't address.
Speaking at the same event, 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.
Regional Performance
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.
Why This Matters:
The banking industry's AI transformation raises fundamental questions about the future of work and who bears the cost of technological progress. While financial institutions stand to gain enormous efficiency and profitability, the human toll — tens of thousands of jobs eliminated, careers made obsolete, families displaced — deserves equal attention in policy discussions. The promise of "financial inclusion" through cheaper banking is real, but it rings hollow if the same workers losing their jobs can't afford to retrain or find comparable employment elsewhere. The Middle East's young, growing population could benefit from accessible financial services, but it also needs stable employment. Without robust retraining programs, social safety nets, and labor protections, AI's efficiency gains will be distributed upward while its costs fall on those least able to absorb them. That's not a technological inevitability. It's a policy choice.