JPMorgan Deploys AI Chatbot to Transform Banking Analyst Roles Amid Automation Fears

JPMorgan Chase has rolled out its AI chatbot, LLM Suite, to employees, aiming to enhance productivity in tasks like data analysis and document summarization. The move highlights the growing impact of AI on banking roles, sparking excitement and concern over potential job losses.

JPMorgan's AI Chatbot LLM Suite Set to Revolutionize Banking Analyst Roles, Sparking Automation Concerns

AI has the potential to significantly alter the roles of banking analysts and equity researchers shortly, potentially rendering the finance industry more akin to the CIA.

According to a report in the Financial Times, JPMorgan Chase, the world's largest bank by market capitalization, has initiated the distribution of its internal chatbot, LLM Suite, to its employees.

An email sent by the bank encouraged them to utilize it for "writing, generating ideas, solving problems using Excel, and summarizing documents," among other purposes.

Fortune was informed by Igor Jablokov, the founder and CEO of AI startup Pryon, that the chatbot could complement the work being conducted at JPMorgan by "a hybrid of human and AI analysts, very similar to how the intelligence community works."

In a disjointed fashion, JPMorgan employees were granted access to the chatbot. JPMorgan's asset and wealth management division employees were informed via email that they would be the most recent to be given access to LLM Suite. As per the Financial Times, approximately 50,000 of JPMorgan's 240,000 global employees have implemented it thus far.

“Think of LLM Suite as a research analyst that can offer information, solutions, and advice on a topic,” noted the email, portions of which Fortune viewed. The memo referred to LLM Suite as “the firm’s ChatGPT-like product.”

Wall Street has been met with both anticipation and apprehension about AI. While the industry may be well-positioned to capitalize on AI's potential, it may also be among the most severely affected by automation-induced job losses.

AI Poised to Transform Banking Jobs, Study Finds, with Major Impact Expected on Employment Levels

According to a study conducted by Accenture, artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to supplant three-quarters of bankers' daily responsibilities. Additionally, Citigroup, a Wall Street behemoth, anticipates that the banking sector will experience the most significant employment losses due to AI automation.

Nevertheless, organizations are not halting the integration of this technology into their daily operations. As AI becomes more accessible, companies seek methods to customize it to meet their unique requirements.

According to Matt Lucas (via Fortune), the field chief technology officer at startup Stardog, which has recently developed its wealth management AI tool, financial firms have been particularly enthusiastic about generative AI due to its capacity to sift through vast quantities of data and identify connections that may have otherwise gone unnoticed by humans.

JPMorgan’s chatbot was “not surprising,” he said in a phone interview. “There’s definitely an appetite for introducing this type of capability inside of firms.”

LLM Suite is not JPMorgan's sole AI chatbot. The bank maintains two additional tools, SpectrumGPT and Connect Coach, which are tailored to business operations rather than the general-purpose LLM Suite.

JPMorgan declined to comment.

“Anytime this type of technology gets introduced, there’s always the question of, ‘Is this going to replace the line worker or the advisor?’” said Lucas, executive director of technology at Morgan Stanley before Stardog. “I see it completely differently. It will make them more effective and powerful in their role.”

Lucas's remarks indicate a prevalent perspective within the current AI growth. Universities such as Stanford and MIT have conducted research that suggests that employees who implement AI are more productive.

However, this does not imply that AI will not eliminate any employment. According to a survey of business executives, 41% anticipated that AI would decrease their workforces. Mustafa Suleyman, the co-founder of DeepMind and an AI pioneer, described the technology as "fundamentally replacing.”

A May 2023 Goldman Sachs analysis, which has been extensively cited, predicted that 300 million jobs worldwide could be affected by AI. Nevertheless, Goldman did not assert that all those positions would be eliminated; instead, he noted that the majority would be reorganized, with AI performing only a portion of their responsibilities.

“Most jobs and industries are only partially exposed to automation and are thus more likely to be complemented rather than substituted by AI,” Goldman Sachs wrote.

AI to Revolutionize Data Handling for Bank Analysts, Enhancing Daily Operations and Efficiency

According to Alex Ratner, CEO of Snorkel, a startup specializing in categorizing enterprise data for use in large language models, bank analysts could access and synthesize significantly more data with AI. For a long time, banks have employed various machine-learning techniques to organize data and make investment decisions. Nevertheless, generative AI will make these capabilities more accessible and, more importantly for rank-and-file employees, applicable to routine daily duties. A PowerPoint presentation from JPMorgan's Investor Day in May discussed using AI tools to “remove ‘no joy’ work.”

There is a prevalent belief that workers are more likely to be supplanted by individuals proficient in utilizing AI than by AI itself as the duties of workers continue to evolve. Jablokov anticipates that AI will alter the nature of employment in the same manner as it did when computers became ubiquitous a few decades ago.

“Remember that at the dawn of the Information Age the only middle managers that lost their jobs were the ones that couldn’t figure out how to use computers in their workflows,” he said. “It’ll be a similar form of top grading for these roles.”