Jane Fraser: Building an AI-Ready Workforce at Citigroup

This question remains a hot topic in boardrooms worldwide: will AI eliminate jobs or open new avenues for employees and their organisations?

At the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) annual gathering in Davos, leaders such as Accenture CEO Julie Sweet and Salesforce’s Marc Benioff emphasised the urgent need to upskill workforces so they can better understand and collaborate with AI.

In conversation with the Washington Post during the event, Citigroup CEO Jane Fraser noted that AI’s impact cuts both ways – its benefits and risks hinge largely on how effectively organisations invest in training.

“AI has the potential to make tremendous changes,” she said. “It’s going to create huge numbers of new jobs that we can’t even imagine what they are today. It will change the nature of what people do every day.”

Jane continued to say that it’s impossible to say whether “puts and takes are going to coincide”, but that her employees “should be as much in the driving seat as possible".

She said: “We’re encouraging our people saying, not that AI is going to take your job away but, someone using AI is probably going to be better at your job than you are.”

How is AI implemented at Citigroup?

Explaining how Citigroup integrates AI across its operations, Jane noted that the bank “put in a set of ethical principles” when the technology was first deployed in 2019.

“I like principles to help guide decision-making because I think it's hard to have entirely rules-based to guide people,” she said, emphasising that employees should be guided by human judgment rather than rigid frameworks.

This philosophy, Jane explained, enables staff to use AI to augment their own capabilities, focusing on how the technology can enhance their roles and better serve customers without overcomplicating its use.

As for her own workflow, the CEO shared that she leverages AI tools “to help me summarise, getting information gathered more efficiently”.

An AI-capable workforce

When asked how Citigroup is preparing its workforce to adopt AI agents, Jane said that training everyone to use the technology is essential.

“It will help them in life as well as at work, so that’s why we started having mandatory training for everyone,” she said.

“Some people can get intimidated by the tools, so let’s help support getting rid of the myths of intimidation.”

Jane’s comments underscore Citigroup’s top-down AI strategy, designed to embed the technology across every function of the bank to modernise legacy infrastructure, increase efficiency and elevate the customer experience.

In 2025, the firm announced that it would equip more than 175,000 employees worldwide with proprietary AI tools as part of its drive toward an “AI-first” culture.

AI’s effect on employee retention

Jane highlighted that many Citigroup employees build decade-long careers across multiple roles within the company.

“50% of all of the new job openings that we have at Citi are taken by existing employees,” she said.

Reflecting on the bank’s 30-year-old site in South Dakota, Jane shared that many staff there have worked at Citigroup for three decades and have held as many as a dozen different roles.

“I want to stack the odds that we will help people reinvent themselves [using AI] the same way as they have done themselves,” she added.

By giving employees ownership of their AI training, Jane believes the company can foster adaptability and openness toward emerging roles.

She concluded that while some skills will grow and others will fade, success lies in learning how to adjust to this fast-changing landscape.