Wall Street banks are looking to speed up operations and cut costs by deploying AI to write performance reviews among other tasks, a Workday boss said in an interview with Bloomberg at its conference in Barcelona. 

Workday's co-CEO Carl Eschenbach said Wall Street banks are keen to get their hands on some of its new AI products.

Workday, a software firm providing tools to help companies manage their workforce, launched a series of products in September that use AI to improve efficiency at work including generating job descriptions in minutes instead of hours as well as producing performance reviews faster. The products will become available in the coming months. 

"You have 100 employees and it takes seven hours to write a job description, so 700 hours," Eschenbach said at the conference. "Now it takes two minutes. You can do the math, you just saved all that. So that's a productivity gain. There's quantifiable impact you can have through the use of AI."

He explained that these tools fit into companies' plans to make their processes more efficient and reduce costs for example, they won't need to hire as many people or need as many staff as they currently do. 

"You're not going to need nearly as many heads if certain pieces of your code can be written 80% by AI," Eschenbach said. "The promise of AI is to drive productivity gains. If you're getting productivity gains out of your existing workforce, you will need less workers."

A number of Wall Street banks are optimistic about how AI will improve productivity since the launch of OpenAI's chatbot ChatGPT in November 2022. 

Deutsche Bank is experimenting with AI capabilities to transform its workforce and make it more efficient. This includes using an AI bot to produce a client briefing, which would typically take junior bankers one or two days.

JPMorgan's CEO Jamie Dimon even thinks AI could reduce people's working week by eliminating some of the more tedious tasks in the day.

Accenture's European tech lead Jan Willem Van Den Bremen reiterated Dimon's thoughts at the Workday conference, saying that AI could eventually "free up" 40% of our working hours, giving people time to focus on more important tasks.