JPMorgan Chase launches AI assistant powered by ChatGPT maker OpenAI

JPMorgan Chase has rolled out generative artificial intelligence assistants to tens of thousands of employees in recent weeks, the first phase of a broader plan to inject the technology across the financial giant.

The program, called LLM Suite, is already available to more than 60,000 employees, helping them with tasks like writing emails and reports. The software is expected to be as ubiquitous in banks as Zoom’s video conferencing program, a person familiar with the plan told CNBC.

Instead of developing its own AI models, JPMorgan designed the LLM Suite to be a portal that allows users to tap into external large language models — complex programs that support generative AI tools — and launched with LLM maker ChatGPT OpenAI, the people said.

“Ultimately, we want to be able to move seamlessly across all models depending on the use case,” Teresa Heitsenrether, JPMorgan’s chief data and analytics officer, said in an interview. “The plan is not to go for a single model provider.”

The move by JPMorgan, the largest US bank by assets, shows how quickly generative AI has swept American companies since the arrival of ChatGPT by the end of 2022. Competing banks Morgan Stanley has released a pair of OpenAI-powered tools for financial advisors. And the consumer tech giant Apple said in June that it integrates the OpenAI model into the operating system of hundreds of millions of its consumer devices, vastly expanding its reach.

Technology – which some are calling the “Cognitive Revolution” where tasks previously performed by knowledge workers will be automated – may be as important as the arrival of electricity, the printing press and the internet, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon said in April.

It will likely “increase almost all jobs” at the bank, Dimon said. JPMorgan had about 313,000 employees in June.

The bank provided employees with ChatGPT OpenAI in a JPMorgan-approved wrapper more than a year after restricting employees from using ChatGPT. That’s because JPMorgan doesn’t want to expose data to external providers, Heitsenrether said.

“Because our data is the main differentiator, we don’t want to use it to train the model,” he said. “We’ve implemented it in such a way that we can use the model while still preserving our data.”

The bank has introduced the LLM Suite broadly across the company, with groups using it across JPMorgan’s consumer division, investment bank, and asset and wealth management businesses, the people said. It can help employees write, summarize long documents, solve problems using Excel, and generate ideas.

But getting it on employees’ desktops is only the first step, according to Heitsenrether, who was promoted in 2023 to lead the adoption of red-hot technology at the bank.

“You have to teach people how to create quick techniques that are relevant to the domain to show them what they can do,” Heitsenrether said. “The more people understand and unlock what’s good and what’s not, the more we start to see these ideas really take off.”

Bank engineers can also use the LLM Suite to integrate functionality from external AI models directly into their programs, he said.

JPMorgan has been working with traditional AI and machine learning for more than a decade, but the arrival of ChatGPT is forcing it to spin.

Traditional, or narrow, AI performs specific tasks that involve pattern recognition, such as making predictions based on historical data. Generative AI goes further, however, and trains models on large data sets with the goal of creating patterns, which is how human-sounding text or realistic images are formed.

The number of uses for generative AI is “exponentially greater” than previous technologies because of the flexible LLM, Heitsenrether said.

The bank is testing many cases for both forms of AI and has put some into production.

JPMorgan is using generative AI to create marketing content for social media channels, map routes for travel agency clients acquired by 2022 and summarize meetings for financial advisors, he said.

Consumer banks are using AI to determine where to put new branches and ATMs using satellite imagery and in call centers to help service personnel quickly find answers, Heitsenrether said.

In the company’s global payments business, which moves more than $8 trillion around the world every day, AI helps prevent hundreds of millions of dollars in fraud, he said.

But the bank is more cautious with generative AI that directly touches individual customers because of the risk that chatbots give bad information, Heitsenrether said.

Ultimately, the field of generative AI could evolve into “five or six big basic models” that dominate the market, he said.

The bank is testing an LLM from a US tech giant as well as an open source model to onboard to the next portal, said the people, who declined to be identified about the bank’s AI strategy.

Heitsenrether presents three stages for the evolution of generative AI at JPMorgan.

The first is simply to make the model available to workers; The second involves increasing JPMorgan’s closed data to help boost employee productivity, which is a stage that has started in the company.

The third is a bigger leap that will unlock greater productivity, which is when generative AI is powerful enough to operate as an autonomous agent performing complex multistep tasks. That would make rank and file employees more like managers with AI assistants at their command.

These technologies will likely empower some workers while displacing others, changing the composition of industries in ways that are hard to predict.

Banking jobs are the most vulnerable to automation of all industries, including technology, health care and retail, according to consulting firm Accenture. AI could increase the sector’s revenue by $170 billion over four years, Citigroup Analysts said.

People should think of generative AI “like an assistant that gets rid of the more general things you don’t want, that can just give you an answer without grinding out a spreadsheet,” Heitsenrether said.

“You can focus on higher work,” he said.

— CNBC’s Leslie Picker contributed to this report.