As AI wipes out desk jobs, Citigroup CEO Jane Fraser says the company is training 175,000 employees to ‘reinvent themselves’ before their roles change forever
The next frontier of work is here, where AI agents are the new coworkers and algorithms operate as office assistants. The advanced tech is already causing a wave of layoffs, resulting in more than 54,000 announced job cuts last year alone. Now, Citigroup CEO Jane Fraser is joining the list of bosses who are stepping in to make sure their staffers can weather the storm.
“AI has the potential to make tremendous changes. It’s going to create huge numbers of new jobs that we can’t even imagine what they are today,” Fraser recently told the Washington Post at Davos. “It will change the nature of what people do every day … And it will take some jobs away.”
Instead of letting Citigroup’s employees fend for themselves, executives mandated that they lean into the technology.
Last year, the $205 billion bank sent out a memo introducing required AI training to 175,000 staffers across 80 locations—instructing them particularly in prompting—Citi confirmed with Fortune. The company’s CEO believes that mandatory instruction helps remove “the myths of intimidation” around the tools, and that strengthening employees’ AI prompting skills will help them “in life as well as work.”
Fraser wants employees to be adaptable and realistic about what new jobs will come and how they need to pivot. Some skills will naturally change or go away, but being handy with AI will ensure they can “cope” with the disruptions.
“I want to stack the odds that we will help our people reinvent themselves,” Fraser explained. “[We want staffers to] feel they’ve got a bit of control by having the training … Our people should be as much in the driving seat as possible. We’re encouraging our people saying, ‘Not that AI is going to take your job away, but someone using AI is going to probably be better at your job than you are.’ So, how do we equip you to use [AI tools]?”
Fortune reached out to Citigroup for comment.
Citigroup is putting 175,000 employees through AI training
Citigroup’s AI training is not only an investment in the livelihoods of its workers—it’s also a win-win for the company. Fraser noted that roughly 50% of all new job openings at the bank are filled by existing employees; staffers spend decades of their careers at Citi. By reskilling its own workforce, it’s cutting hiring costs while leveraging employees who already know the company inside out.
“This training is about teaching our colleagues the possibilities of great prompting versus basic prompting to generate impactful results,” Peter Fox, head of learning at Citi, told Fortune last year. He added that the training platform is adaptive, tailored to an employee’s knowledge level: “Experts can complete it in under 10 minutes, while beginners take about 30 minutes.”
So far, the company says, the training has been successful; last year, Citi reported that its employees had entered more than 6.5 million prompts into the built-in AI tools. The internal memo added that the bank’s AI adoption is “turning work that once took hours into tasks done in minutes.” Citi has enjoyed a 70% adoption rate of its proprietary AI tools, according to 2025 fourth-quarter findings, and colleagues across 84 countries interacted with the bank’s AI tools over 21 million times.
Plus, the training is giving staffers some reassurance that the technology is meant to work alongside them—and that it won’t trample on their careers.
“People may wonder if they will become expendable,” Christina Muller, workplace mental health expert and consultant at R3 Continuum, a national HR and workplace behavioral health agency, told Fortune last year. “Training is crucial to reinforce that AI is meant to be a copilot—not a replacement—on an already flying plane.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com