JPMorgan says every new hire will get training for AI: ‘No joy work handled’

JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Financial Officer Jeremy Barnum said technology spending will be about $17 billion for this year.

JPMorgan Chase & Co. is immersing new employees in artificial-intelligence training, preparing them for a technology Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon has likened to the impact of the printing press and steam engine.

The JPMorgan Chase & Co. logo is seen at the company's headquarters in New York.(AP)

“This year, everyone coming in here will have prompt engineering training to get them ready for the AI of the future,” Mary Erdoes, who runs the asset- and wealth-management unit, said of her unit’s efforts at the firm’s investor day Monday.

Erdoes said AI is helping on two fronts in her division: time saving and revenue growth. The business is reducing time spent “hunting and pecking,” she said, by enabling bankers to pull up certain information on potential investments while clients are on the phone. It’s also getting rid of “no joy work” by eliminating repeatable, rote tasks. That has already saved some analysts two to four hours of their workdays, according to Erdoes.

JPMorgan sees the emerging technology as worth between $1 billion and $1.5 billion, President Daniel Pinto said at the event. AI will have a “very, very” large impact for the firm’s 60,000 developers and 80,000 operations and call-center employees — nearly half the company. Dimon said on Monday that AI will change every job.

“We don’t have to debate the importance of it anymore, it is important,” Dimon said. In April, he said AI may be the biggest issue his bank is grappling with and likened its impact to the Internet, electricity and computing.

Chief Financial Officer Jeremy Barnum said technology spending will be about $17 billion for this year.

As a nod to how AI has seeped into all aspects of life at JPMorgan, Erdoes walked to the podium accompanied by a song she said was generated by feeding the slide deck into a large-language model.