(Bloomberg) — JPMorgan Chase & Co. 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.
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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. But AI isn’t without risks to the financial system. Gary Gensler, head of the US Securities and Exchange Commission, says the technology can make it hard to understand why decisions are made, and increase volatility and instability.
Gensler became one of the first regulators to propose rules for AI that would force trading houses and money managers to determine whether their use of AI or predictive data poses a conflict of interest. And US Representative Maxine Waters, the top Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, has warned that financial firms’ use of the technology could lead to more discrimination in lending.
In terms of how AI will affect how regular people interact with money, Dimon doesn’t envision one single finance “superapp,” 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 Ltd.’s Alipay and Tencent Holdings Ltd.’s 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 superapps and their services, but Dimon concluded that rather than one central “everything app” in the US, there will be a bunch of “mini superapps” 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.
This episode of The Circuit with Emily Chang premieres Wednesday, April 17, at 6 p.m. ET on Bloomberg Originals, Bloomberg Television, Bloomberg.com, the Bloomberg app and the Bloomberg Originals YouTube channel. Check out The Circuit podcast for extended conversations.
–With assistance from Hannah Levitt, Lauren Ellis and Alan Jeffries.
(Updates with some risks for AI in banking in sixth and seventh paragraphs.)
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