JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon doesn’t need to be sold on the value of AI.
The world’s largest bank has been working on artificial intelligence for more than a decade. It employs more than 2,000 machine learning and AI experts and data scientists worldwide, with than 400 AI use cases already deployed in areas such as marketing, fraud, and risk, as detailed in Dimon’s latest letter to shareholders.
AI scours the $10 trillion that JPMorgan moves through the world’s financial systems every day, looking for signs of potential fraud. Voice recognition confirms the ID of customers when they call about their accounts. AI assists bankers and customer-service reps, and eventually, Dimon says, AI agents will solve customer problems.
“AI is real,” Dimon said during a briefing with reporters at a hotel conference room in Seattle on Monday evening, after spending the day with JPMorgan tech leaders in meetings with Microsoft and Amazon. “I don’t know exactly the pace at which AI is going to change everything, but it will change a lot.”
So GeekWire asked the bank chief: does he use AI himself?
After a brief pause, Dimon smiled and said yes — acknowledging that he used AI to help research a portion of his annual letter that called attention to the “low-income and rural Americans who feel left behind amid the growing wealth and prosperity of others around them,” as he wrote in a section on U.S. domestic policy.
“You guys should be using it,” he told the assembled reporters. “It’s unbelievable.”
As further evidence, Dimon told a story about using AI prior to a meeting with Elon Musk. It had been years since they’d met, and someone told Dimon that he should read Walter Isaacson’s biography of the Tesla and SpaceX founder beforehand. But the meeting was in an hour, barely enough time to get through a chapter.
“I said, ‘Can you please summarize Walter Isaacson’s book in a couple of pages for me?’ It summarized it, and I read that,” Dimon explained.
The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Dimon and Musk have been mending their relationship since earlier this year, even as JPMorgan and Tesla remain locked in a legal battle over $162 million that the bank says the automaker owes in a longstanding dispute over stock warrants.
It’s not just the boss using AI. Prompt engineering training has become standard for new hires, said Mary Erdoes, CEO of JPMorgan’s Asset & Wealth Management group, during the company’s recent investor day.
To be sure, Dimon is clear-eyed about the risks inherent to AI, in areas including cybersecurity and bias. In his annual letter, he wrote that risks need to be “rigorously managed,” and said the company will work with regulators, clients and others to ensure it maintains high standards of ethics and transparency in its AI adoption.
He also addressed AI’s long-term workforce impact.
“Over time, we anticipate that our use of AI has the potential to augment virtually every job, as well as impact our workforce composition,” he wrote in the letter. “It may reduce certain job categories or roles, but it may create others as well. As we have in the past, we will aggressively retrain and redeploy our talent to make sure we are taking care of our employees if they are affected by this trend.”
JPMorgan Chase has a large technology engineering center in downtown Seattle, which now numbers 365 people, focusing on technologies including cybersecurity, cloud technologies, AI, and machine learning.
Some of the company’s Seattle-area operations trace back to its acquisition of Washington Mutual’s banking operations at the height of the 2008 financial crisis.
Updated with details of the Wall Street Journal’s reporting on Musk and Dimon.
