When it comes to artificial intelligence there are two camps: those who are skeptical about how much AI will impact our future and those who believe it will change the world forever. JPMorgan Chase’s CEO Jamie Dimon falls firmly in the latter group.
Whether or not you currently work with technology, the billionaire boss of the New York–based bank has even insisted that nearly all professions will get an AI makeover.
“This is not hype,” the Wall Street titan told CNBC. “This is real.”
Dimon revealed that he’s got 200 workers at JPMorgan dedicated to researching the wave of large language models, from Bing and Bard to ChatGPT—including how they could be used internally.
AI will eventually “be used in almost every job,” he concluded.
Dimon, who has previously called AI “critical to our company’s future success,” has in the past said that the technology can be used to help Chase develop new products, drive customer engagement, improve productivity, and enhance risk management.
And he’s putting his money where his mouth is: The banking behemoth advertised more than 3,500 AI-related roles between February and April last year, according to data from consultancy Evident.
Just last year, JPMorgan Chase hired Teresa Heitsenrether to lead the adoption of AI across the world’s largest bank by market capitalization, in the newly created role of chief data and analytics officer.
Even beyond the banking world, the chief artificial intelligence officer is fast becoming a new fixture in the C-suite. Meanwhile, data scientists, information security analysts, and software programmers are among America’s fastest-growing jobs right now.
We’re not in a bubble
Worried about investing in AI-specific roles and functions, only for the trend to fizzle out tomorrow? Dimon highly doubts it.
He doubled down on his belief that AI is here for the long haul, arguing that the current buzz is nothing like the late-’90s dotcom bubble, when investors overly hyped up the internet and caused a serious boom-and-bust cycle in the stock market.
“When we had the internet bubble the first time around…that was hype. This is not hype. It’s real,” Dimon added. “People are deploying it at different speeds, but it will handle a tremendous amount of stuff.”
The billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban, who made a big chunk of his $7 billion fortune while the dotcom bubble was inflating, echoed that he doesn’t see the resemblance to that precarious period.
“We are not in a tech bubble, and as far as similarities [to the dotcom era] go…none at all,” he told Fortune.
Despite the recent rise in stock prices, he’s not seeing many dotcom-era features, noting that “we’re not seeing ridiculous companies go public or raise money.”
Cuban and Dimon’s take isn’t unanimous among analysts. This weekend legendary investor Marc Rowan’s Apollo Global Management warned AI stock valuations have surpassed the excesses of the dotcom era.
“The top 10 companies in the S&P 500 today are more overvalued than the top 10 companies were during the tech bubble in the mid-1990s,” wrote Torsten Sløk, partner and chief economist at Rowan’s wealth management firm, in a research note.
AI will do more good than harm, Dimon says
Despite previously airing his fears of “AI being used by bad people to do bad things,” Dimon is now calling himself a “big optimist” when it comes to the impact AI can have—for good.
The 67-year-old Harvard Business School–educated CEO sees AI making significant breakthroughs in cybersecurity and pharmaceutical research.
“It may invent cancer cures because it can do things that the human mind simply cannot do,” Dimon told CNBC.
It’s not the first time he’s touted AI’s cancer-curing potential: “Your children are going to live to 100 and not have cancer because of technology,” Dimon previously said. “And literally they’ll probably be working three-and-a-half days a week.”
