Chief Executive Officer of JPMorgan Chase & Co. Jamie Dimon, during a conversation with media representatives, outlined his vision regarding the question of what configuration of the future will become a reality for money in a world where artificial intelligence is the main technology.
It is worth noting that currently, the mentioned financial institution is making significant efforts to develop machine intelligence. JPMorgan, the largest bank in the United States, recognizes the enormous potential of artificial intelligence as a kind of force that fundamentally transforms workflows and provides a new space of opportunity.
Machine intelligence is already one of the main components in the plans for the activities and subsequent development of a financial institution. This was stated by Jamie Dimon, separately noting that the bank considers artificial intelligence as a tool for improving wealth. At the same time, he said, AI will become more sophisticated in the foreseeable future.
Jamie Dimon says that artificial intelligence will provide significant assistance in studying the habits of consumers and companies, analyzing their successful projects in the past to form a strategy for further development within the framework of the concept of actions focused on maximum efficiency and effectiveness.
This year, in a letter to JPMorgan shareholders, the CEO of the bank paid special attention to the importance of machine intelligence. In this context, the significance of artificial intelligence for a financial institution in particular and society in general was underlined. In terms of the scale of the impact on the global level on the processes of vital activity realized in the space of human life, Jamie Dimon compared AI, which is currently under intensive development, with a printing press, a steam engine, electricity, computing, and the Internet.
Currently, JPMorgan, based in New York, has thousands of employees already using artificial intelligence. Jamie Dimon has already stated that machine intelligence will be embedded in all processes of a financial institution, including trading, research, equity hedging, and customer service. Many scenarios of using artificial intelligence in the corporate operating space of the bank involve applying advanced technology as a co-pilot.
Jamie Dimon says that AI is likely to significantly improve the quality of life of workers. However, at the same time, he noted that some jobs will be lost, which is a characteristic pattern recorded based on the experience of scaling up the use of other advanced technologies that have become a tool of action in the past.
Artificial intelligence has already become a source of profitability for JPMorgan. Scaling up the process of using advanced technology is likely to increase the benefits for the financial institution. At the same time, the advantages of applying artificial intelligence do not negate the potential risks associated with it. In this case, first of all, threats to the financial system are implied, the implementation of which is not inevitable and belongs to the category of hypothetical probabilities.
Gary Gensler, head of the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, said that artificial intelligence can make it difficult to understand the reasons for making decisions. Also, in his opinion, the use of AI in the sphere of finance can increase volatility and instability.
Gary Gensler proposed the rules for applying artificial intelligence, which stipulate that trading houses and money managers must determine whether their concept of using advanced technology or predictive data is the cause of a conflict of interest.
Maxine Waters, the top Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, says that scaling up the AI usage process could increase discrimination in lending.
During a conversation with media representatives, Jamie Dimon, answering a question about the impact of artificial intelligence on the traditional practice of people interacting with money, said that he did not imagine a single financial super app, implying a digital product capable of solving almost any task. It is worth noting that such solutions are actively developing in China. At the same time, financial super apps have not become a popular digital product in the United States.
In 2018, Jamie Dimon sent a team of specialists to China to learn more about platforms in demand in the Asian country, such as Alipay from Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and WeChat from Tencent Holdings Ltd. The mentioned services combine social networks, e-mail, solutions for e-commerce, and payment transactions within a single digital product. Back in the United States, a team of JPMorgan specialists built a chart of all Chinese superapps. After studying this data, Jamie Dimon decided that in the United States, instead of one central universal app, there will be many digital products, each of which will have its own functional purpose.
JPMorgan already offers its customers credit card services. Also, the financial institution is currently expanding its activities in the areas of travel, restaurant, and hotel business. According to Jamie Dimon, everything a financial institution does depends on technology. In this context, he noted that the dependence of the bank’s activities and its products on artificial intelligence will increase.
Jamie Dimon also noted during his communication with media representatives that AI should not be perceived as a digital adviser, whose point of view on the future development of certain processes and phenomena is reasonable and unambiguously correct. In this context, he noted that the possibilities of artificial intelligence have their limits. In his opinion, AI cannot, for example, advise on buying shares, which is guaranteed to make a profit. At the same time, Jamie Dimon stated his belief that artificial intelligence will bring people closer to a future in which investing will be automated. This implies financial injections in the autopilot format and with a good result. From what the JPMorgan CEO said, it can be concluded that AI as a financial advisor is currently a tool with limited capabilities that should not be trusted unconditionally, but over time, advanced technology can achieve a much higher level of development in terms of the effectiveness of solving such tasks.
It is worth noting that the use of artificial intelligence in the financial system contains potential risks that relate not only to the danger of making wrong decisions and increasing volatility.
Scammers also have access to AI. This means that artificial intelligence can be used as a tool for committing crimes. To deceive, AI can generate fake content that has signs of realism. For example, there have already been cases when people performed certain actions involving financial costs at the request of their superiors or friends, but then it turned out that their virtual communication was carried out with deep fake technology. These examples highlight the problem that AI makes fraud methods more sophisticated and difficult to detect. Against the background of the current realities, there is a growing risk that people with a high level of technological literacy may also become victims of cybercriminals.
Data from Cifas, a non-profit fraud prevention service in the United Kingdom, shows that in the mentioned country in 2022, the number of reports that artificial intelligence tools were used to fool banking systems increased by 84%. Stephen Dalton, a representative of the mentioned organization, says that in the process of applying for financial services, the raising of the use of fake images, video, and audio is being recorded.
During a speech at the World Economic Forum in January 2024, Mary Callahan Erdoes, head of JPMorgan’s asset and wealth management unit, said that the use of artificial intelligence by cybercriminals was a serious concern. Recently, the mentioned financial institution has been spending $15 billion annually on the development of crime prevention technologies in the virtual space. The bank has also hired 62,000 specialists, many of whom focus exclusively on cybersecurity issues.
It is worth noting that during the period of the existence of digital threats, raising awareness can be a personal contribution of everyone to countering risks. For example, a query in the Internet search system, such as How do I know if my phone camera is hacked, will allow anyone to get information about signs of unauthorized access to the device.
Natalie Kelly, chief risk officer for Europe at payments group Visa, says that humans are always the weak link in the anti-fraud chain. According to her, the most common misconception is that almost everyone is confident in their own invulnerability to cyber criminals. She noted that scammers very often have an impact on emotions.
Artificial intelligence is a technology with massive capabilities. AI can also be described as an example of how force can be both creative and destructive, depending on the scenarios of its use. Moreover, it should be noted that artificial intelligence is in a phase of active development. For this reason, those tools to counter the destructive use of AI that are effective today may not show even a minimal result tomorrow.
