JPMorgan Chase rolls out AI assistant powered by ChatGPT maker OpenAI

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

The program, called LLM Suite, is already available to more than 60,000 employees and helps them with tasks such as writing emails and reports. The expectation is that the software will eventually become as ubiquitous within the bank as the videoconferencing program Zoom, people with knowledge of the plans told CNBC.

Instead of developing its own AI models, JPMorgan designed the LLM Suite as a portal that lets users tap into external large language models — the complex programs that underlie generative AI tools — and launched it with ChatGPT maker’s LLM OpenAI, the people said. .

“Ultimately, we want to be able to move freely between models depending on the use cases,” Teresa HeitsenretherJPMorgan’s Chief Data and Analytics Officer said in an interview. “The plan is not beholden to one model provider.”

The move by JPMorgan, the largest US bank by assets, shows how quickly generative AI has reached US companies since the arrival of ChatGPT in late 2022. Morgan Stanley has already released a few OpenAI-powered tools for its financial advisors. And consumer tech giant Apple said in June that it was integrate OpenAI models the operating systems of hundreds of millions of consumer devices, vastly expanding its reach.

The technology – hailed by some as the ‘Cognitive revolution“in which tasks previously done by knowledge workers will be automated – could be as important as the advent of electricity, the printing press and the Internet, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon said in April.

It will likely “increase virtually every job” at the bank, Dimon said. JPMorgan had about 313,000 employees in June.

The bank gives employees what is essentially OpenAI’s ChatGPT in a JPMorgan-approved package over a year later limited prevent employees from using ChatGPT. That’s because JPMorgan didn’t want to release its data to outside vendors, Heitsenrether said.

“Since our data is a key differentiator, we don’t want it to be used to train the model,” she said. “We implemented it in a way that allows us to leverage the model while protecting our data.”

The bank has rolled out the LLM Suite broadly across the company, with groups using it across JPMorgan’s consumer, investment banking and asset management businesses, the people said. It can help employees with writing, summarizing long documents, troubleshooting Excel problems, and generating ideas.

But getting it onto employees’ desktops is just the first step, said Heitsenrether, who was promoted in 2023 to lead the bank’s adoption of the glowing technology.

‘You have to teach people how to do that fast technology that’s relevant to their domain to show them what it can actually do,” Heitsenrether said. “The more people dive deep into it and find out what it’s good at and what it’s not, the more we really start to see the ideas see it bloom.”

The bank’s engineers can also use the LLM Suite to incorporate features from external AI models directly into their programs, she said.

JPMorgan has been working on traditional AI and machine learning for more than a decade, but the arrival of ChatGPT forced it to pivot.

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

The number of applications for generative AI is “exponentially greater” than previous technology because of the flexibility of LLMs, Heitsenrether said.

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

JPMorgan uses generative AI to create marketing content for social media channels, map out routes for customers of the travel agency it was acquired in 2022 and summarizes meetings for financial advisors, she said.

The consumer bank uses AI to determine where to place new branches and ATMs by incorporating satellite images and call centers to help service staff find answers quickly, 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, she said.

But the bank is more cautious with generative AI that directly affects the individual customer, because of the risk that a chatbot provides bad information, Heitsenrether said.

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

The bank is testing LLMs from US tech giants and open source models to then move to the portal, said the people, who declined to be identified talking about the bank’s AI strategy.

Heitsenrether mapped out three phases for the evolution of generative AI at JPMorgan.

The first is simply making the models available to employees; the second involves adding proprietary JPMorgan data to help boost employee productivity, a phase that is just beginning at the company.

The third is a bigger leap that would yield much greater productivity gains, and that is when generative AI is powerful enough to operate autonomously. agents that perform complex, multi-step tasks. That would make ordinary employees more like managers, with AI assistants at their disposal.

The technology will likely empower some workers and displace others, changing the makeup of the industry in ways that are difficult to predict.

According to the consultancy, banking jobs are the most susceptible to automation of all sectors, including technology, healthcare and retail Accenture. AI could increase industry profits by $170 billion in just four years Citi Group analysts said. A

People should think of generative AI “as an assistant that takes away the more mundane things that we all wouldn’t want to do, and can just give you the answer without having to dig through the spreadsheets,” Heitsenrether said.

“You can focus on the higher value work,” she said.

– CNBC’s Leslie Picker contributed to this report.