JPMorgan Chase has rolled out a generative artificial intelligence assistant to tens of thousands of its employees in recent weeks, the initial phase of a broader plan to inject the technology throughout the sprawling financial giant. The program, called LLM Suite, is already available to more than 60,000 employees, helping them with tasks like writing emails and reports. The software is expected to eventually be as ubiquitous within the bank as the videoconferencing program Zoom, people with knowledge of the plans told CNBC. Rather than developing its own AI models, JPMorgan designed LLM Suite to be a portal that allows users to tap external large language models — the complex programs underpinning generative AI tools — and launched it with ChatGPT maker OpenAI's LLM, said the people. "Ultimately, we'd like to be able to move pretty fluidly across models depending on the use cases," Teresa Heitsenrether, JPMorgan's chief data and analytics officer, said in an interview. "The plan is not to be beholden to any one model provider."

Teresa Heitsenrether is the firm's chief data and analytics officer. Courtesy: Joe Vericker | PhotoBureau

The move by JPMorgan, the largest U.S. bank by assets, shows how quickly generative AI has swept through American corporations since the arrival of ChatGPT in late 2022. Rival bank Morgan Stanley has already released a pair of OpenAI-powered tools for its financial advisors. And consumer tech giant Apple said in June that it was integrating OpenAI models into the operating system of hundreds of millions of its consumer devices, vastly expanding its reach. The technology — hailed by some as the "Cognitive Revolution" in which tasks formerly 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 "augment virtually every job" at the bank, Dimon said. JPMorgan had about 313,000 employees as of June.

ChatGPT ban

The bank is giving employees what is essentially OpenAI's ChatGPT in a JPMorgan-approved wrapper more than a year after it restricted employees from using ChatGPT. That's because JPMorgan didn't want to expose its data to external providers, Heitsenrether said. "Since our data is a key differentiator, we don't want it being used to train the model," she said. "We've implemented it in a way that we can leverage the model while still keeping our data protected." The bank has introduced LLM Suite broadly across the company, with groups using it in JPMorgan's consumer division, investment bank, and asset and wealth management business, the people said. It can help employees with writing, summarizing lengthy documents, problem solving using Excel, and generating ideas. But getting it on employees' desktops is just the first step, according to Heitsenrether, who was promoted in 2023 to lead the bank's adoption of the red-hot technology. "You have to teach people how to do prompt engineering that is relevant for their domain to show them what it can actually do," Heitsenrether said. "The more people get deep into it and unlock what it's good at and what it's not, the more we're starting to see the ideas really flourishing." The bank's engineers can also use LLM Suite to incorporate functions from external AI models directly into their programs, she said.

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