Wall Street’s race to deploy artificial intelligence is colliding with executives’ fears of upending their workforces and the well-trod path to finding the next masters of the universe.JPMorgan is among banks that use the artificial-intelligence agent Felix.Already, big banks are touting the productivity gains they are seeing as they roll out AI across departments including legal, wealth management and investment banking. Yet even as other U.S. companies slash thousands of jobs, bank executives are wrestling with how to deal with the looming mismatch in their staffing and shifting talent needs.“We’re very actively thinking about: How do we retrain? How do we get ahead of that?” Wells Fargo Chief Executive Officer Charlie Scharf said at a recent industry conference.AI’s march across Wall Street, meanwhile, is accelerating, with banks using it to speed up underwriting for commercial loans, generate drafts of regulatory filings and review coding for back-end technology. AI agents are also being put to work in relationship-driven businesses such as wealth management.Citigroup has joined with Alphabet’s Google to develop an AI-powered agent that can work with its wealth clients. The bank said the agent would supplement—not replace—its human advisers.“There’s fear out there in the marketplace around AI,” said Andy Sieg, head of wealth at Citi. But he said the role of AI is “to supercharge” the abilities of advisers.AI’s potential to transform Wall Street is especially apparent in banks’ lucrative investment-banking divisions, where future rainmakers often start out as junior analysts performing rote tasks. Now analysts are using AI to model transactions more quickly and even generate ideas for deals. JPMorgan’s and Citi’s investment bankers are among those using Felix, an AI agent developed by the startup Rogo.Rogo CEO Gabriel Stengel said that, within 25 minutes, Felix created a first pass on a 24-page presentation for a deal to take a company private.“Normally that would have taken days,” he said.Stengel said he believes that AI tools will ultimately encourage banks to hire more rank-and-file staff while also pushing down the cost of delivering financial services to clients.Clients, for their part, are already expecting more from bankers.Some investment bankers said clients familiar with AI now expect them to produce slide decks, financial models and other materials more quickly. Certain clients are using AI themselves to generate sharper or more-technical questions, or to compare pitches from different banks. Moreover, lower-cost investment-banking services might push down the fees bankers charge clients.Banks have so far been reluctant to make significant cuts to their workforces.More than two-thirds of banking executives said they expect AI to have little impact on overall staffing levels at their banks in the next three years, according to a survey by IntraFi, which provides deposit services to banks. About a quarter expect to reduce staffing somewhat, while 3% anticipate increasing their staffing.More widely, AI has been a leading reason cited for job cuts this year, especially among tech companies. Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg called AI “the most consequential technology of our lifetimes” in a memo citing the company’s decision to trim thousands of employees.Banks are weighing the same decisions. The British bank Standard Chartered said it would likely cut more than 15% of back-office roles over the next four years because of AI. Soon after, Standard Chartered CEO Bill Winters apologized for saying the technology would replace “lower value human capital” and that it still isn’t known how AI will ultimately reshape workforces.Bilal Hafeez, head of strategy and AI at Macro Hive, a financial-research and AI analytics platform, said that instead of more salespeople and ​​economists, there will be more need for roles that build, test and monitor AI models.“AI means there will be less of a need to hire for traditional finance roles in the long run,” he said. “It’s kind of a mindset shift.”At JPMorgan Chase, CEO Jamie Dimon said earlier this year that AI has already displaced some employees, but that the bank has offered those people other roles. Well-trained and talented people can be redeployed, Dimon said.Dimon has more recently acknowledged the deeper changes AI could eventually bring about, beyond what head counts can show.“Certain things won’t change. I tell people you have to move money, raise money, send money, manage money,” Dimon told investors last month. “But everything else can change.”Write to Ben Glickman at ben.glickman@wsj.com, Alexander Saeedy at alexander.saeedy@wsj.com and Gina Heeb at gina.heeb@wsj.com