Good morning. New York has overtaken the San Francisco Bay Area as North America’s largest tech-talent workforce by headcount, and Wall Street’s growing demand for AI talent is helping reshape the market—though San Francisco isn’t ceding its crown entirely.
The finding comes from CBRE’s “Scoring Tech Talent 2026” report. New York Metro’s tech-talent workforce grew by 30,640 to 394,300 between 2022 and 2025, while the San Francisco Bay Area’s contracted by 23,900 to 375,730—marking the first time New York has led by headcount in the report’s 13-year history.
The shift reflects New York’s more diversified tech economy. While 61% of San Francisco’s tech talent works directly in high-tech companies, New York’s tech workforce is spread more broadly across industries, including financial services.
Across the U.S. and Canada, the number of tech-talent workers with AI skills rose 45% year over year to 751,000 as of mid-2026. The San Francisco Bay Area still leads in raw AI-specialist numbers and has a higher concentration of AI job postings overall (26%, versus 17% in New York).
But when it comes to financial services specifically, New York and Dallas-Fort Worth tied for the highest concentration of AI-specialty talent among major markets, at 20% each, ahead of Toronto (19%) and Chicago (16%). Financial firms are increasingly competing with technology companies for workers who can put AI into production inside highly regulated businesses.
Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, recently said the bank will likely hire more AI specialists. “There will be all different types of jobs, and I think we will be hiring more AI people and fewer bankers in certain categories,” he said in a Bloomberg Television interview.
JPMorgan’s Data & AI organization includes teams working on LLM applications, fraud models, risk systems, personalization and automation.
Big banks—including JPMorgan, Citi, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America—are all investing heavily in AI to boost efficiency, and Bank of America is already pointing to measurable returns.
I reported last month that during a media call following Bank of America’s second-quarter earnings, CFO Alastair Borthwick said, “New AI capabilities now allow more than 200,000 of our employees to work more effectively, and they’ve helped contribute to producing a 59% efficiency ratio, a roughly 360 basis point improvement from last year.”
Slower hiring and layoffs in the technology industry have also created opportunities for non-tech employers to build their tech-talent teams. CBRE found that financial services, insurance and real estate added 90,530 tech jobs since 2022, while the high-tech sector shed 21,262.
Although New York now leads in tech-talent headcount, San Francisco remains No. 1 in CBRE’s broader tech talent ranking—which incorporates 13 metrics including talent concentration, wages and AI strength, areas where the Bay Area’s smaller, denser workforce still gives it an edge.
Sheryl Estrada
Sheryl.Estrada@fortune.com
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
