JPMorgan Chase is winning the AI banking race — and its lead is getting bigger

JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon. - Photo: Tom Williams (Getty Images)
JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon. - Photo: Tom Williams (Getty Images)

JPMorgan Chase (JPM) held onto its spot as the artificial intelligence adoption leader in the banking sector.

The largest U.S. bank has the highest volume of AI talent, which has grown 16% in the past 12 months, and has more AI researchers than its seven biggest competitors combined, according to the latest Evident AI Index, released Thursday.

“JPMorganChase is unquestionably still the bank to beat when it comes to AI maturity,” said Evident co-founder and co-CEO Annabel Ayles. “The pace of its AI adoption is remarkable for an organization of its size and scale.”

JPMorgan had been investing in AI for years before the chatbot craze took hold with the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022. The financial institution hired its head of AI research, Manuela Veloso, in 2018 and has since grown its use cases to more than 400.

And JPMorgan is already beginning to see the dollar value of its commitment. Company President Daniel Pinto said last month that the bank is expecting to see nearly $2 billion in returns from its investment into the technology this year, particularly related to fraud prevention.

“Going forward, we think that artificial intelligence, large language models will have — and we are doing a lot of work on this over the medium- to long-term — a big impact in improving processes and efficiencies in the operational services that we have,” Pinto said.

The old guard

Since Evident began its rankings in early 2023, the top four banks have not only remained in their positions but have continued to plow forward.

“The leaders are just pulling ahead and leading more,” Alexandra Mousavizadeh, Evident co-founder and co-CEO, said in an interview.

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Evident evaluates 50 major banks in North America, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific based on public data relating to AI adoption, scoring the institutions based on talent, innovation, transparency, and leadership.

While all 50 banks in the index have ramped up their adoption efforts since last year, the top 10 are improving twice as fast as the rest of the field, Evident found.

Mousavizadeh said banks that are committing to AI are going all in: hiring, poaching talent, figuring out internal systems, testing, and partnering with major players such as Nvidia (NVDA) and Microsoft (MSFT).

“We can see these dynamics are creating bifurcation in the banking system,” Mousavizadeh said. “If you are slightly standing still, at what point does it become almost impossible to catch up? I would say we’re 18 months away from that.”

Rising stars

A number of banks are doing the opposite of standing still.

The biggest riser in this year’s index is Morgan Stanley (MS), which jumped seven points and landed itself a spot in the top 10. The investment bank first partnered with OpenAI in March 2023, when it became the AI startup’s only wealth management partner.

The firm rolled out the AI @ Morgan Stanley Assistant, a generative AI chatbot that helped financial advisors access the bank’s vast array of technical know-how, in September 2023. And this past June, the bank rolled out Debrief, a generative AI assistant that will support its financial advisors, built on OpenAI’s GPT-4.

“The rise of HSBC (HSBC) and Morgan Stanley show that it’s still possible for banks that have been slower out of the gates on AI to catch up and even overtake the field,” Ayles said. “The race for AI adoption is far from run, but there’s a growing gap between the leaders and the rest of the field. The lower ranking institutions need to pick up the pace if they wish to go the distance.”

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