Before artificial intelligence begins to replace jobs on Wall Street, it is first creating new positions.
Analysis exclusively provided to CNBC by Draup, a corporate recruitment data company, shows that banks including JPMorgan Chase, Citibank, and Capital One have seen a 49% increase in job postings related to AI this year compared to 2025, reaching 139,819 positions.
The fastest-growing area is a set of skills centered around AI and agents. Draup captures data from public recruitment information and platforms such as LinkedIn. For example, mentions of agent and orchestration – that is, the ability to design agents that can collaborate to complete tasks – have surged by 1,721% this year.
"This can be considered the hottest skill on Wall Street," said Vijay Swaminathan, CEO of Draup, in an interview. "It's a huge opportunity. They need people who understand data, as well as AI, and who also know where to place AI."
These job listings indicate that Wall Street banks are moving beyond chatbots and entering the next phase of their AI strategy, a phase that will affect executives, employees, and shareholders. In order to fulfill their commitment to AI of improving productivity and automating repetitive tasks, banks are paving the way for a future comprised of a large number of agents, which will be tasked with an increasing amount of work.
In the early stages, the recruitment for AI was mainly led by engineers and data scientists, who were responsible for building models or adapting them to corporate data; today, this trend has expanded to include those who are in charge of directly integrating AI into business operations.
Swaminathan indicates that when deploying AI within financial institutions, it is often necessary to link multiple specialized agents components together: for example, one is responsible for checking the raw data, another analyzes the files, and the third ensures compliance with regulatory requirements.
He stated that the employees involved in this process are usually referred to as forward-deployed and engineers. They need to possess both technical capabilities and knowledge in specific business or functional areas, ranging from trading desks to back-office operations, and even to human resources.
For example, if one were to create a set of agents to automatically approve employee leave applications, it would lead to a large number of edge cases and specific exemptions.
"There is a lot of complexity within companies," said Swaminathan, "sometimes this complexity is obvious, but in many cases it is hidden. Even automating a simple process can take a long time."
He stated that skills agent, orchestration, forward-deployed, and engineers are particularly important, as their job is to determine which agents are needed, what each agent should do, and which technologies to use. This also includes deciding when manual supervision is required.
Agent Technology Stack
Other popular skills related to the construction of AI involve understanding the tools and technologies that enable agents to complete tasks.
According to the analysis of Draup, mentions of LangGraph – a framework used for building multi-step workflows – have increased by 679%; the mention volume of LlamaIndex which helps AI applications connect data has risen by 291%; and the mention volume of retrieval-augmented and generation ( RAG ), a technology that inputs company database information into the AI model, has increased by 259%.
However, in addition to technical capabilities, there is also an increasing emphasis on so-called soft skills.
"Our analysis shows that people are placing renewed emphasis on soft skills such as problem-solving, creativity, the ability to ask sharp questions, and maintaining a firm stance while gaining a deeper understanding of processes," he said.
AI Other areas of growth in this field also include those responsible for establishing safeguards for emerging systems, which also entails the need for risk and control infrastructure.
According to the data from Draup, the number of job listings related to "responsible AI" has surged by 657% this year; mentions of AI governance and risk management have increased by 394% and 359% respectively. Security teams are also paying attention to how to prevent systemic vulnerabilities caused by third-party tools or external models being integrated.
Currently, the number of mentions of governance-related skills in the Draup data has exceeded 16,000 times, which is nearly twice the approximately 8,400 mentions related to model training, deployment, and operation.
"We are very concerned about ensuring that third parties used in these products do not get out of control from a cybersecurity perspective," he said.
According to Draup, positions related to generative technologies AI and agents generally offer higher salaries than other tech positions in the financial industry. The median basic annual salary for a manager in generative technology AI is approximately $190,000.
Despite higher salaries, it is still difficult to fill these professional positions, says Swaminathan.
To fill this gap, large banks are vigorously promoting internal retraining programs to train existing developers and experts in the field, he said.
This construction process itself will also bring about a chain reaction: JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon once mentioned that as AI takes on more work, there will be a "huge redeployment plan."
“I believe that the more we prioritize these soft skills with appropriate technical capabilities, the better people will be able to adapt and learn,” said Swaminathan. “This is a very exciting era for the right talents.”
