American Express Will Cut About 5% of Its Workforce - Roughly 3,800 Jobs - to Prepare for AI

American Express is the latest financial giant to say the quiet part out loud. On its third-quarter earnings call Friday, the company announced it will cut roughly 5% of its global workforce and took a $336 million restructuring charge in the quarter to do it. Against the roughly 76,800 people Amex employed at the end of 2025, that works out to about 3,800 positions - CFO Christophe Le Caillec put the number at around 3,850, while other reports cited roughly 3,500. It is the company's first major layoff round in nearly a decade.

Executives did not bury the AI angle. Le Caillec told CNBC the restructuring is designed to make American Express "leaner, more agile, and also to prepare for AI," adding: "You don't want to automate processes that are not optimally structured. So what we're doing here is to reduce layers and increase spans of control, so that we can automate and take advantage of AI in the coming quarters and the coming years." CEO Stephen Squeri said the company's strong performance this year let it "invest in making the organization more efficient and better prepared for the future."

The cuts land from a position of strength rather than distress. Amex posted third-quarter adjusted earnings of $4.68 per share, beating the $4.49 analysts expected, on revenue of $20.06 billion, up 9% year over year but a touch below the $20.14 billion consensus. Net income rose 28% to $3.71 billion. The company raised its full-year outlook to GAAP EPS of $18.30-18.60 and adjusted EPS of $17.60-17.90. Card spending of $454 billion came in below expectations, and the stock fell more than 3.5% on the day, leaving it down about 15% for the year.

Amex joins a fast-growing list of financial firms reframing headcount around AI. Barclays said this week it will cut 5,000 jobs, about 5% of its workforce, with CEO CS Venkatakrishnan saying AI "may have a more important role to play in the future - we will employ the AI at scale," though he called it "the icing on the cake, not the cake." Citigroup has cut around 20,000 roles this year, HSBC is weighing a multiyear plan affecting about 20,000, and Standard Chartered plans to eliminate roughly 7,800 jobs, 15% of its workforce, by 2030.

The pattern across these announcements is strikingly consistent: cut management layers first, widen spans of control, then automate the flattened structure. Le Caillec's framing makes the sequencing explicit - the reorganization is a prerequisite for automation, not a consequence of it. That suggests a second wave of AI-driven efficiency gains at Amex still ahead, rather than behind it.

For the broader white-collar labor market, a payments company eliminating nearly 4,000 jobs while posting record profits and raising guidance is the sharpest data point yet that this cycle is about repositioning, not retrenchment. Economists have warned for months that customer service, bookkeeping, payroll and HR roles are the most exposed; a survey of Americans aged 18-34 released in August found 27% believed they or someone they knew had already lost a job to AI replacement. Amex did not specify which departments or locations would be affected.