The Financial Post reports in its Thursday, May 21, edition that Wall Street leaders' rhetoric about the impact of artificial intelligence on their firms has taken a dystopian turn. A Bloomberg dispatch to the Post reports that Standard Chartered chief executive officer Bill Winters announced plans to replace 8,000 support roles with financial and technology capital over the next four years. Similarly, Goldman Sachs' John Waldron referred to his firm's traditional operations as a "human assembly line" ready for automation. Historically, talks about job cuts in finance have been sensitive. However, Wells Fargo CEO Charlie Scharf acknowledged in December that admitting to potential lower head counts is difficult. Recently, bank executives seem to be expressing this reality more openly. AI agents are already able to handle routine back-office tasks and even some of the work performed by junior bankers. Roughly 30 per cent of work hours in finance and insurance could be automated by 2030, Mckinsey & Co. estimates. And more than half of jobs across banking have a high potential to be replaced by technology, according to research from Citigroup. Last year, big U.S. banks reduced staff by the most in almost a decade.