Dive Brief:
- JPMorgan Chase retained its leading position in AI adoption across the banking sector this year, according to the Evident AI Index published Thursday. The financial sector research firm ranked AI maturity among the top 50 banks based on talent development, public reporting and innovation and leadership metrics.
- The bank has the largest AI workforce of the financial organizations Evident analyzed and employs more AI researchers than the next seven largest contenders combined. JPMorgan was also among the few financial companies to report ROI on use cases, Evident said.
- Capital One ranked second in AI adoption and made headway catching up to JPMorgan by doubling down on AI skills and development capabilities, according to Evident. The bank captured leading positions in density of AI talent relative to overall headcount and in innovation based on the number of patents filed. Capital One owned 38% of AI patents filed by 50 banks in the index.
Dive Insight:
As banks raced to develop generative AI use cases, JPMorgan balanced speed with prudence.
The bank took a top-down approach to adoption, adding Chief Data and Analytics Officer Teresa Heitsenrether to its technology leadership team in June 2023, and putting an AI assistant called LLM Suite in the hands of 140,000 employees last month.
Along the way, the company rolled out ChatCFO, a generative AI tool for finance teams and implemented prompt engineering training for new hires.
JPMorgan Chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon prioritized data and infrastructure modernization to drive AI adoption in an April letter to shareholders, stating the bank planned to have 75% of data and 70% of applications migrated to the cloud by the end of the year.
“The characteristic of the top banks is that they started preparing five or six years ago with restructuring, hiring and putting in a research lab,” Alexandra Mousavizadeh, co-founder and co-CEO of Evident, told CIO Dive. “That’s what Jamie Dimon did.”
All four of the leading banks, JPMorgan, Capital One, Royal Bank of Canada and Wells Fargo, have dedicated AI research teams, according to Mousavizadeh. “If you're going to scale your capabilities across multiple lines of business, you’re going to need a research hub,” she said.
The three largest U.S. players, JPMorgan, Capital One and Wells Fargo, employ 17.5% of banking’s AI talent pool, the analysis found. The AI workforce, which Mousavizadeh said encompasses roughly 240 roles and titles, grew 17% year over year across all 50 banks in the study.
The data-rich financial sector is uniquely positioned to lead the way in responsible adoption. “These are big legacy organizations that have a lot of data, a wide range of potential use cases and money to spend on compute power,” Mousavizadeh said.
As a highly regulated industry, banking has a vested interest in AI governance issues. JPMorgan, Capital One, Citi and several other large financial institutions are tackling compliance frameworks as part of the Fintech Open Source Foundation, an alliance that includes hyperscalers AWS, Microsoft, Google Cloud and a number of enterprise technology vendors.
Banks lean on open source to attract talent, Mousavizadeh said. But erecting consistent guardrails and industry standards around model behavior remains paramount.
“Any bank using an AI-driven tool that comes out with something crazy is toast — they’re out of business,” Mousavizadeh said.
