JPMORGAN chief executive officer Jamie Dimon makes no secret that his firm is all-in on artificial intelligence. Now, the head of the world’s biggest bank is laying out his vision for the future of money in an AI world.
Will you be able to turn to the bank’s future chatbot–let’s call it ChatJPM–and say, “I have 30 years, what should I do?” Yes, says Dimon, kicking off the second season of the Bloomberg Originals series The Circuit with Emily Chang. “We, in some ways, can do that a little bit already today,” he said in an interview.
AI is already embedded in JPMorgan’s wealth plans, but soon that technology will be even more sophisticated, he said. “All that is going to do is know more about you, learn more about you, look at patterns and, you know, look at successful things in the past,” Dimon added. “AI is going to be a huge aid to things like that.”
In a recent letter to shareholders, Dimon devoted a significant amount of ink to the importance of AI for JPMorgan and society at large. He likened the emerging technology to the “printing press, the steam engine, electricity, computing and the Internet.”
The New York-based bank already has thousands of employees working on AI. Dimon has said previously that AI will be embedded in every one of the bank’s processes, including trading, research, equity hedging and customer service, often as a sort of co-pilot. AI is likely to make dramatic improvements in workers’ quality of life, but as with every new technology, some jobs will also be lost, Dimon said.
AI tools are already starting to generate revenue for the bank, and future advances in the technology are likely to produce even more benefits.
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Dimon doesn’t envision one single finance “super app,” a term that loosely describes applications that can do, well, almost everything. (They’ve taken off in China but failed to gain traction in the US.) In 2018, he sent a team to China to learn about popular platforms like Alibaba Group Holding’s Alipay and Tencent Holdings’ WeChat, which integrate services as diverse as social media, e-commerce and payments into one central hub. The team returned and built a chart of all of China’s super apps and their services, but Dimon concluded that rather than one central “everything app” in the US, there will be a bunch of “mini super apps” instead.
JPMorgan already offers credit card services and is expanding into travel, restaurants and hotels. “There are all these adjacencies on everything we do that will be, are tech driven, and will be increasingly AI driven,” Dimon said. “So think of anything we offer you will be driven a lot by AI.”
What if you tell a future, hypothetical JPMorgan chatbot that you want to get rich quick?
“I hope it tells you that you’re crazy,” Dimon said, pointing out that technology still has its limits. “AI can’t be a stock picker.” Even if every stock were perfectly priced, Dimon doesn ’t think even AI could choose flawlessly. But he does believe AI will get us closer to a future where we can put our money on autopilot. BLOOMBERG
