Citigroup Mandates AI Training For 175,000 Employees To Help Them 'Reinvent Themselves' (fortune.com)
- Reference: 0180666142
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/26/01/27/1825244/citigroup-mandates-ai-training-for-175000-employees-to-help-them-reinvent-themselves
- Source link: https://fortune.com/2026/01/27/citigroup-ceo-jane-fraser-employees-trained-reinvent-themselves-with-ai-before-tech-changes-roles-forever/
The $205 billion bank sent out an internal memo last year requiring staffers to learn prompting skills specifically. Fraser told the Washington Post at Davos that AI "will change the nature of what people do every day" and "will take some jobs away." The adaptive training platform lets experts complete the course in under 10 minutes while beginners need about 30 minutes. Citi reported last year that employees had entered more than 6.5 million prompts into its built-in AI tools, and Q4 2025 data shows a 70% adoption rate for the bank's proprietary AI tools.
[1] https://fortune.com/2026/01/27/citigroup-ceo-jane-fraser-employees-trained-reinvent-themselves-with-ai-before-tech-changes-roles-forever/
"Welcome to CitiBank: I love you." (Score:3)
I fear what these employees will be reinventing themselves as is drones with ever less expertise, who can be ever less helpful, and who will eventually devolve into nothing but intermediary impediments between the customer and the chatbot they never wanted to talk to in the first place.
...and when it gives you BS data... (Score:2)
And once it gives you BS data to a seemingly correct input, then you can use that as justification to commit dollarcrime.
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I work for a company damn near the same size as Citygroup, and while there definitely wasn't mandatory training for AI tools, it's heavily encouraged (as it is in every large business, especially in tech businesses).
Simple coding project, 600 lines of code. ChatGPT can't handle it. Internal support had me open a support ticket directly with OpenAI, and after many many emails back and forth (and easily demonstrating the issue repeatedly) they basically threw their hands up and gave up, saying they just g
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I work for a similarly-sized moneycorp.
I guess we're less top-down than some peers, at least about this stuff.
But we have a mostly free hand to use LLMs, or not. There has been vague encouragement to experiment with them, and the data security policy of course applies, but otherwise, no mandates or even heavy-handed suggestions.
I think the main use here is as a coding assistant, but engineers are expected to support/talk about/defend the code they check in, and the way we work enforces that.
We're buil
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Your company had you open a support ticket because ChatGPT couldn't write some code? I'm pretty sure ChatGPT isn't provided with any kind a guarantee or warranty that it will do that. Much like google search it's meant to be a tool to assist and have a human vet it's output is valid for the use case before throwing it into production.
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Your job as an employee being forced to use AI tools is to feed it bogus garbage data. That way when they eventually try to use it to replace you it royally blows up in their face.
Mandatory AI training .. (Score:2)
You type extended prompts into the LLM then wade through masses of verbiage, which either hallucinates or contradicts itself in the same text. When you point this out, the LLM asks if you want to speak to a mental health professional.
I know how this works (Score:1)
I've trained my replacement before.
What Does AI Think? (Score:2)
Oh, Citigroup, you absolute trailblazers of the corporate cosmos! Nothing screams "reinvent yourself" quite like forcing 175,000 people to sit through a glorified crash course in typing clever sentences into a chatbot. Truly, the Renaissance has arrived—except instead of Michelangelo sculpting David, we've got Bob from accounting learning how to ask AI for a pivot table in 30 minutes flat.
And let's not forget the memo—because nothing inspires innovation like a sternly worded email reminding you
Priorities in Training... (Score:2)
If your mandatory AI course is ten minutes long, and your mandatory sexual harassment training is two hours long, you might have a problem.
Hm (Score:2)
Ok, what's wrong with this?
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Oh, nothing. Everyone loves a mandatory training.
Re:Hm (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps a better question is 'why is it newsworthy?'
All these companies push all sorts of mandatory training. It's only vaguely indicative of things they *might* think need to be taken seriously or need to show they care about stuff like legal compliance, harassment, discrimination, privacy, or security.
Hilarious on those trainings that have questions to check your knowledge that boil down to "what bad thing is *technically* ok for you to do?"
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Hardly newsworthy. Likely just about any white collar company over 100 people has offered or made mandatory some sort of AI training by this point.
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> Oh, nothing. Everyone loves a mandatory training.
Who said mandatory training is to be loved. It's an essential part of working life. Not something worth putting on Slashdot.
Yeah I was enrolled in mandatory CoPilot training too. Whoop de fucking do. We do training for various company tools all the time, some of them turn out to be useless.
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I had a similar training recently, and used an AI browser extension to do it for me. It was significantly slower than doing it by hand, but it surprisingly mostly worked, it also used a lot of tokens and "AI" (which leadership seems to aim for).
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>> Oh, nothing. Everyone loves a mandatory training.
> Who said mandatory training is to be loved. It's an essential part of working life. Not something worth putting on Slashdot.
> Yeah I was enrolled in mandatory CoPilot training too. Whoop de fucking do. We do training for various company tools all the time, some of them turn out to be useless.
I see what you're saying, but the article frames this as something bigger than just another new tool to be learned. And is sounds like the Citigroup management think that way too.
I wonder if it is similar to the introduction of computers on the desk for office workers.
I think this transition happened sometime in the 1990s. In the 1980s, only computer programmers had computers on their desk, with the occasional exception of specialised work like CAD (Computer Aided Design) which was just starting to come in.
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Can't wait until the AI mixes up the Zimbabwe dollar and the U.S. dollar in a transaction...
Replication of duties. (Score:2)
They are training their replacement.
Just a wild ass guess though, but knowing efficiencies are always driven from the top, this is the primary likelihood.