The Financial Services Workforce Reset: Closing The Digital Skills Gap With AI
The financial services industry is changing faster than ever. Fintech disruptors, AI-driven platforms, and global tech giants are rewriting customer expectations, demanding faster, smarter, and more personalized services – and automation is playing a central role.
“With the developments of generative AI (genAI), research indicates that 32-39% of the work performed across capital markets, insurance and banking businesses has high potential to be fully automated and 34-37% holds high augmentation potential. This has driven a significant increase in new AI investment.” – World Economic Forum, Artificial Intelligence in Financial Services
For banks and insurers, failing to adapt isn’t just a competitive risk; it can also compromise compliance, slow innovation, and reduce operational efficiency. Yet technology alone won’t close the gap. The true differentiator is the workforce: the people designing, managing, and delivering these services.
Today, FS&I leaders confront a stark reality: the skills needed to thrive in a digital-first world are evolving faster than traditional workforce strategies can keep up.
The Digital Skills Gap Is Real
The numbers are striking. By 2030, 70% of the skills used in most roles will change, driven largely by AI (LinkedIn). At the same time, 90% of leaders in Financial Services believe their organization needs to consider significant adjustments or total transformation of their reskilling strategy to support the future (World Economic Forum).
There’s a dual recruitment challenge: Fewer young professionals are entering finance, even as demand for digital, regulatory, and AI-related skills surges – while those who are experts are retiring in droves.
Legacy job frameworks and rigid role definitions make it difficult to anticipate gaps or redeploy talent effectively.
Why AI Is a Critical Enabler
AI isn’t just a buzzword; it’s the tool that can help FS&I firms close the gap – if implemented responsibly. By analyzing work at the task level, and talent at the level of skills, AI can:
- Map current workforce capabilities in real time
- Highlight emerging skill shortages in areas like ESG, cybersecurity, and AML
- Identify employees who can pivot to new roles with minimal training
- Recommend targeted upskilling or redeployment, maximizing internal mobility
- Support smarter automation decisions by identifying which tasks can be fully automated versus those better augmented with AI, freeing humans to focus on higher-value work
Unlike traditional approaches that rely on static job titles, task-level insights show what employees actually do – and what they could do with the right support. For example, a compliance analyst with Python or SQL skills could be redeployed to support an AI-driven risk platform, reducing hiring costs and ramp-up time (while freeing them from repetitive, automatable tasks).
Ninety-seven percent of employers in Financial Services expect AI and information processing technologies to transform their business by 2030 – higher than the cross-industry average (86%). – World Economic Forum
The Challenges of Using AI in Financial Services
Even with AI, FS&I leaders face three key hurdles:
- Rapidly changing skills: Regulatory updates, digital transformation, and fintech disruption make workforce planning a moving target.
- Compliance and trust requirements: Any AI-powered decision must be transparent, explainable, and free of bias to meet GDPR, EU AI Act, and FCA standards. Opaque AI tools increase reputational and compliance risk.
- Fragmented data and siloed systems: Disconnected HR, L&D, and compliance platforms make it difficult to see the full picture of internal skills and redeploy talent effectively.
Operationalizing Ethical AI
FS&I firms can overcome these challenges by embedding AI thoughtfully and ethically:
- Unify skills data across global systems to create a single source of truth
- Use explainable, auditable AI to ensure recommendations are transparent and defensible
- Embed human oversight at every stage, keeping accountability central
- Measure impact on regulatory readiness, time-to-mobility, cost-to-fill, and skills gap mitigation
By following these steps, firms gain the agility to respond quickly to regulatory changes, market shifts, and evolving talent requirements.
The Benefits Are Clear
A skills- and task-based strategy only reaches its full potential when combined with AI. In financial services, AI does more than identify gaps: it translates insights into action, helping leaders make decisions faster, with greater precision, and in full compliance with regulatory standards.
Place the right talent, faster
AI analyzes skills, tasks, and potential across internal and external talent pools, helping teams fill critical roles with the most qualified people – even when they don’t fit traditional job titles. Organizations using this approach see dramatically higher placement accuracy.
Unlock hidden potential
AI surfaces employees whose skills align with emerging priorities, enabling redeployment to critical projects like AI-driven risk platforms, cybersecurity, or ESG initiatives – boosting workforce agility and innovation.
Prioritize upskilling where it matters most
By predicting which skills will be in highest demand, AI guides targeted learning investments, ensuring employees develop the capabilities the business truly needs.
Expand and diversify talent pools
AI-driven skills mapping moves the focus from degrees and titles to capabilities and potential, uncovering high-value candidates internally and externally who might otherwise be overlooked.
The result is a workforce that’s more adaptable, more productive, and more engaged. Employees gain visibility into meaningful career pathways, while leaders gain the confidence that every talent decision is based on real-time data, aligned with business priorities, and resilient to change.
In short, AI doesn’t just make a skills strategy possible – it makes it effective.
How Beamery Helps Financial Services Reset Their Workforce
Beamery enables banks and insurers to operationalize the workforce reset quickly, responsibly, and with an eye on the future. Our AI-powered platform provides:
- Dynamic visibility into skills, tasks, and roles across the organization, giving an up-to-date picture of workforce capabilities.
- Scenario modeling and workforce simulations, so leaders can explore “what-if” scenarios – for example, introducing a new AI platform, responding to regulatory changes, or launching a new product line – and understand how skills, tasks, and headcount may be impacted before decisions are made.
- Actionable insights to close gaps through hiring, internal mobility, and targeted upskilling, ensuring the right people are in the right roles at the right time.
- Ethical, explainable AI-driven talent matching that widens candidate pools, reduces bias, and ensures every recommendation can withstand regulatory scrutiny.
By combining dynamic workforce data with talent marketing insights and predictive modeling, Beamery helps FS&I leaders not only address current skills gaps but plan confidently for the workforce of tomorrow.
In financial services, ethical AI is more than a compliance safeguard – it is a competitive advantage. By mapping skills in real time, enabling rapid redeployment, and guiding reskilling, Beamery helps firms close the digital skills gap while building future-ready teams.
HR Teams Are Fighting Their Own AI Battle
But of course HR teams face a steep adoption curve. Awareness that AI and machine learning are foundational in HR has grown from under 30% two years ago to nearly 40% today, with even higher numbers expected by the end of 2025 (Fosway Group). 80% of organizations plan to expand AI capabilities, and most believe up to half of HR tasks could be automated by 2030.
Eighty-seven percent of CHROs expect productivity gains from AI, and 83% see AI managing more HR tasks (SHRM).
Still, only around 20% of organizations feel they’ve moved beyond early experimentation (Fosway Group). While almost half of CEOs say integrating AI into technology platforms and workflows is a top priority, only a third are planning to apply it to workforce and skills strategy (PwC).
And in Financial Services, adoption is even slower. Only 18% of FS executives report using generative AI in talent functions, compared with 47% in marketing or sales (Deloitte).
This creates a paradox: HR is under pressure to modernize and transform the workforce, yet many teams lack the tools, resources, or organizational alignment to operationalize AI effectively. Without a clear approach, they risk falling behind other functions and leaving skills gaps unaddressed.
Facing an uphill battle to secure support and investment for AI tools in HR? Read our handy guide.
The Workforce Reset Starts Now
For FS&I leaders, the choice is clear: embrace AI-powered, skills-based strategies or risk falling behind. With the right data, insights, and ethical AI tools, it’s possible to transform the workforce, reduce risk, and stay competitive in an era of rapid change.