Proactive Investors - The printing press, the steam engine, electricity, computing and internet. Achievement’s Jamie Dimon placed artificial intelligence on par with in his annual shareholder letter.
Indeed, the rapidly emerging technology holds the potential to augment “virtually every job”, the JPMorgan Chase (NYSE:JPM) & Co (NYSE:JPM, ETR:CMC) boss wrote in the statement on Monday.
“We are completely convinced the consequences will be extraordinary and possibly as transformational as some of the major technological inventions of the past several hundred years,” he said.
Such use of the technology, which exploded with the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022, will pose threats, though, Dimon added.
On the jobs side, generative AI may well reduce the need for certain roles or categories as it upends “entire business workflows”, he continued, but it could create others.
Bias, intellectual property theft, infiltration of companies’ systems and other disruptive or damaging uses were also highlighted in the letter.
“You may already be aware that there are bad actors using AI,” Dimon wrote, leaving him stressing a need for “the highest ethical standards”, transparency and rigorous management of how the technology is used.
According to Dimon, JPMorgan has already begun incorporating AI at scale to counter such threats.
Aside from the 400 use cases in the likes of fraud and risk departments, JP Morgan also employs over 2,000 AI machine learning experts and data scientists, Dimon explained.
Given Dimon’s position among key prominent financial leaders, managing a 300,000-plus-strong employee company, his annual letter is often eagerly anticipated.
“This is something that is usually read closely by analysts and investors as it can hold clues to the economy’s flight path from here,” Hargreaves Lansdown’s Sophie Lund-Yates explained.
Such extensive commentary on the ramifications of the AI boom was always going to spark interest, therefore, especially as Dimon listed the technology first among the “most important” issues facing JPMorgan in the multi-thousand-word document.
His comments indeed echoed long-standing murmurings from across the industry, albeit fitting into the narrative of mass adoption rather than shunning AI on fears of the likes of a takeover.
For instance, in the US alone, government awards worth tens of billions of dollars were granted to Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) and TSMC over the last few weeks alone to bolster domestic chip production, while more is expected to be given to Samsung (KS:005930) in the coming days.
Within JPMorgan, Dimon noted AI had first been adopted well over a decade ago.
That said, the extensive update on JPMorgan’s use of AI appears to reflect the very real widespread adoption of the technology over the past year.
As Bloomberg’s Caroline Hyde pointed out: “None of this is wildly new, but headlines are always created when one of the most powerful chief executives in the world reminds us that AI is top of mind.”