Dimon says AI could have similar impact as the printing press, electricity and internet

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon published his annual letter to shareholders on Monday in which he discussed the implications of artificial intelligence (AI) on the operations of the largest lender in the U.S. and the economy at large.

Dimon, a billionaire who has led JPMorgan Chase since 2006, mentioned AI as the first item in the portion of his shareholder letter addressing specific issues the company faces. He said AI will have a transformative impact on much of business and society even though the technology’s full potential hasn’t yet been realized.

“While we do not know the full effect or the precise rate at which AI will change our business – or how it will affect society at large – we are completely convinced the consequences will be extraordinary and possibly transformational as some of the major technological inventions of the past several hundred years: Think the printing press, the steam engine, electricity, computing and the Internet, among others,” Dimon wrote.

Dimon noted that JPMorgan Chase began using AI a decade ago, and in the time since he first referenced it in his shareholder letter in 2017, the company has “grown our AI organization materially” and “now includes more than 2,000 AI/machine learning (ML) experts and data scientists.”

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“We have been actively using predictive AI and ML for years – and now have over 400 use cases in production in areas such as marketing, fraud and risk – and they are increasingly driving real business value across our businesses and functions,” he explained.

“We’re also exploring the potential that generative AI (GenAI) can unlock across a range of domains, most notably in software engineering, customer service and operations, as well as in general employee productivity,” Dimon explained. “In the future, we envision GenAI helping us reimagine entire business workflows. We will continue to experiment with these AI and ML capabilities and implement solutions in a safe, responsible way.”

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Dimon went on to discuss the financial implications of AI investments as well as its use by JPMorgan Chase’s workforce and the creation or elimination of jobs.

“While we are investing more money in our AI capabilities, many of these projects pay for themselves,” he wrote. “Over time, we anticipate that our use of AI has the potential to augment virtually every job, as well as impact our workforce composition. 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.”

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JPMorgan Chase’s status as the largest U.S. bank with a significant global footprint gives it access to vast troves of data that Dimon said can be harnessed to provide better financial insights and risk management.

“As a global leader across businesses and regions, we have large amounts of extraordinarily rich data that, together with AI, can fuel better insights and help us improve how we manage risk and serve our customers,” he explained.

Dimon said the company is working to “proactively stay in front of AI-related risks, particularly as the regulatory landscape evolves” and that AI is part of JPMorgan Chase’s toolset to stop “bad actors using AI to try to infiltrate companies’ systems to steal money and intellectual property or simply to cause disruption and damage.”