In a clear signal of how central artificial intelligence (AI) has become to its business strategy, JP Morgan Chase has restructured its leadership so that its AI and data function reports directly to CEO Jamie Dimon and the company president—not the technology head. “We took AI, slash data, out of technology. It’s too important,” Dimon said at the Databricks Data + AI Summit currently underway in San Francisco.
During his chat with Databricks chief executive Ali Ghodsi, Dimon also emphasised the need to elevate AI to the highest level of management attention.
The firm is investing heavily to back this strategic focus. Of its $18 billion annual IT budget, nearly $2 billion is now directed towards AI. Dimon added that the firm has developed over 600 AI use cases across the enterprise, spanning risk management, credit cards, securities trading, and even real-time global payments.
The financial giant isn’t just experimenting—it’s deploying. One standout initiative involves large language models (LLMs) trained on internal proprietary data, which are used by 200,000 employees. The goal is to harness insights from emails, legal documents, transaction histories, and customer behavior—all while maintaining strict data privacy.
Dimon sees AI as transformative for every function, process, and role at the bank. But he’s also pragmatic about the implementation challenge: “The hardest part is the data… It isn’t the AI.”
(The correspondent is in San Francisco at the invitation of Databricks)