Nearly a quarter of Wall Street finance firms are using AI proficiency as a major metric to determine employees’ bonuses, raises or promotions, a new survey by recruiter Selby Jennings has found.

A further 30 per cent require employees to disclose their use of AI tools in formal performance reviews. In addition, 42 per cent have introduced formal criteria to assess employee AI skills and nearly one in three firms have dedicated teams or roles dedicated to tracking whether AI is achieving a return on investment.

The survey, seen by Reuters, polled 500 executives across the finance industry.

“Companies are no longer just seeing if their employees are using AI tools but are also monitoring its impact on output and contribution to ‌business ⁠results,” Dylan Gomez, executive director at Selby Jennings, told the newswire.

“While currently there is no established formula on how much compensation is getting tied to AI usage and performance, we ⁠expect this to become more defined by next year,” Gomez added.

The move is a bet on AI by an industry that has profited heavily from the spending boom the product has triggered. The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday that major Wall Street banks including JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have seen rising third-quarter profits on the back of advisory and placement fees for major AI deals.

AI adoption inside the industry has accelerated in recent months, too, with major developer OpenAI rolling out a financial services-focused version of its GPT-6 Astra model in September.

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