JPMorgan, OpenAI & Anthropic: Evolving Banking Operations

Financial institutions are racing to deploy AI systems that can handle complex tasks autonomously, trying to move beyond chatbots to agents that work across multiple business functions. 

JPMorgan Chase, the US bank, is now providing 250,000 employees with access to LLM Suite – a platform that connects staff to large language models (LLMs) from OpenAI and Anthropic – as part of a programme to integrate AI across its operations.

JPMorgan updates LLM Suite every eight weeks as it adds data from its business units, expanding what the platform can do.

“The broad vision that we're working towards is one where the JPMorgan Chase of the future is going to be a fully AI-connected enterprise,” Derek Waldron, Chief Analytics Officer at JPMorgan tells CNBC.

The bank wants to provide AI assistants to all employees, automate back-office processes and use AI to manage client interactions. 

Derek demonstrates the platform creating an investment banking presentation in 30 seconds, work that previously required hours from junior bankers.

LLM Suite in practice: Connecting AI models to proprietary data

JPMorgan launched LLM Suite in 2023, initially providing employees with access to OpenAI's models for drafting emails and summarising documents. 

The platform now incorporates models from Anthropic, which develops the Claude language model. 

About half of the 250,000 employees with access use it daily. 

The bank feeds LLM Suite data from its databases and software applications. 

Derek, a former partner at McKinsey with a doctorate in computational physics, demonstrates the platform by asking it to prepare a presentation for a meeting with Nvidia.

LLM Suite generated a deck with news, earnings data and peer comparisons. 

The bank is now training AI to draft confidential memoranda for merger and acquisition clients.

“There is a value gap between what the technology is capable of and the ability to fully capture that within an enterprise,” Derek says. 

Companies “work in thousands of different applications, there's a lot of work to connect those applications into an AI ecosystem and make them consumable”.

Why workforce implications remain uncertain

AI was discussed at a four-day executive retreat held in July by Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan. 

Participants talked about how AI-driven changes would affect the bank's 317,000-person workforce and the apprenticeship model in investment banking. 

Derek says AI will empower some workers while others will be displaced as processes no longer require human involvement.

“Every employee will have their own personalised AI assistant; every process is powered by AI agents – and every client experience has an AI concierge,” he says.

As a result, workers who interact directly with clients are positioned to benefit, yet operations and support staff who handle routine processes face potential displacement. 

In May, the head of JPMorgan's consumer banking division told investors that operations staff would fall by at least 10% over five years due to AI deployment.

“In an AI world, you'll still have people at the top who are managing and have relationships with clients, but many, many of the processes underneath are now being done by AI systems,” Derek says.

Senior Wall Street executives at several firms, speaking anonymously, have discussed changing the ratio of junior bankers to senior managers from 6-1 to 4-1. 

The prospect of reduced workloads means fewer junior bankers may be needed even as AI-enabled teams handle more work.

Furthermore, an MIT report from July found that most corporations had not generated returns on AI projects despite more than US$30bn in investments. 

Derek acknowledges it will take years for JPMorgan to connect AI models with the bank's data and software, which has an annual technology budget of US$18bn.

“Without a doubt, AI technology will have changes on the construction of the workforce,” Derek says. 

“That is certain, but I think it's unclear as to exactly what those changes will look like.”