Jamie Dimon, the boss of JP Morgan, has said artificial intelligence “may go too fast for society” and cause “civil unrest” unless governments and business support displaced workers.

While advances in AI will have huge benefits from increasing productivity to curing diseases, the technology may need to be phased in to “save society”.

Dimon said companies and governments cannot ignore AI or “put your head in the sand”. The Wall Street lender will probably have fewer employees in five years as it rolls out AI, he told an audience at the World Economic Forum in the Swiss resort of Davos.

“Your competitors are going to use it and countries are going to use it,” he said. “However, it may go too fast for society and if it goes too fast for society that’s where governments and businesses [need to] in a collaborative way step in together and come up with a way to retrain people and move it over time.”

Dimon said local governments may need to use assistance programmes, which support wages and offer retraining, relocation and early retirement.

The two million commercial lorry drivers in the US are an example of an area that may need support as driverless trucks hit the road, he said.

“Should you do it all at once if two million people go from driving a truck and making $150,000 a year to a next job [that] might be $25,000? No. You will have civil unrest,” Dimon said. “So phase it in.

“If we have to do that to save society … Society will have more production, we are going to cure a lot of cancers, you’re not going to slow it down. How do you have plans in place if it does something terrible?”

Dimon, who was speaking before Donald Trump addressed the World Economic Forum, offered a restrained critique of the US president’s increasingly combative approach to Europe and Nato and demands to take over Greenland.

“If the goal is to make them stronger rather than fragment Europe, I think that’s OK,” Dimon said. “I would be using our moral persuasion, our economic persuasion, our intelligence and military to push Europe to do the things that’s right for Europe. The leadership of Europe has to do it, it really can’t be done by America.”

Dimon also revealed his concerns about Trump’s immigration clampdown, calling for the “internal anger” over the issue to be calmed down.

“I don’t like what I’m seeing with five grown men beating up little women,” said Dimon, referring to scenes of violence involving Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers. Rounding up criminals is one thing,” Dimon added, but he would like to see data showing who has been rounded up and whether they had broken the law.

Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, flanked by the Apple CEO Tim Cook and the European Central Bank president Christine Lagarde in Davos. Photograph: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

Dimon added that many migrants play important roles in the US economy, such as in healthcare, hospitality and agriculture. “We all know them. They are good people and they should be treated that way.”

Jensen Huang, chief executive of the semiconductor maker Nvidia, whose chips are used to power many AI systems, argued that labour shortages, rather than mass payoffs are the threat.

Playing down fears of AI-driven job losses, Huang told the meeting in Davos that “energy’s creating jobs, the chips industry is creating jobs, the infrastructure layer is creating jobs … jobs, jobs, jobs”.

He added: “This is the largest infrastructure buildout in human history, this is going to create a lot of jobs.”

Many of those jobs relate to tradecraft, Huang said, such as plumbers, electricians, construction, steelworkers, network technicians, and people who install equipment for AI rollout.

This is already pushing up salaries in this area in the US, he added, for people involved in building chip factories or AI datacentres.

Huang also argued that AI robotics is a “once-in-a-generation” opportunity for Europe, as the region has an “incredibly strong” industrial manufacturing base.

“This is your opportunity to now leap past the era of software,” he argued, an area where Silicon Valley has long outperformed Europe.