JPMorgan’s plans for a ChatGPT-like investment service are just part of its larger AI ambitions

JPMorgan Chase is developing a ChatGPT-like service to provide investment advice to customers, according to CNBC reporting, which found that the financial services company has applied to trademark a product called IndexGPT. The filing said IndexGPT will tap “cloud computing software using artificial intelligence” for “analyzing and selecting securities tailored to customer needs.

However, the generative AI product would just be a small part of JPMorgan’s larger AI ambitions.

Just this week, for example, JPMorgan’s global chief information officer Lori Beer said in an Investor Day presentation that the company is “ahead of our plan to deliver on our commitment to deliver $1 billion in business value through AI” this year alone. She added that the firm has increased its artificial intelligence and machine learning use cases by more than 34% year over year, with more than 300 use cases in production and $220 million in positive revenue impact last year.

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“I am confident we will hit our new target of delivering $1.5 billion of value by the end of this year, demonstrating our leadership position in AI,” she said, pointing out that the bank has more than 900 data scientists, 600 machine learning engineers, about 1,000 people involved in data management and a 200-person AI research team.

“We couldn’t discuss AI without mentioning GPT and large language models,” she added. “We are actively configuring our environment and capabilities to enable them. In fact, we have a number of use cases leveraging GPT-4 and other open-source models under testing and evaluation.”

JPMorgan enjoys AI success, but restricts ChatGPT

In the first AI Index of global banks released in January, JPMorgan Chase topped the ranking across all four pillars: talent, innovation, leadership and transparency.

The company’s AI efforts have been in the works for years: In 2018, the firm hired Manuela Veloso, a professor at Carnegie Mellon, to build on the bank’s existing work applying machine learning technology. And even ChatGPT-like models are already in use at JPMorgan, including a model to analyze statements and speeches from the U.S. Federal Reserve from the past 25 years.

While JPMorgan’s IndexGPT might be the first financial services incumbent to release a ChatGPT-like product directly to consumers, others in the financial industry are fully on board with developing large language models (LLMs) and trademarked GPT products. In March, for example, Bloomberg released a research paper detailing the development of BloombergGPT, a new LLM trained on financial data to support natural language processing (NLP) tasks within the financial industry.

Still, its own AI success doesn’t preclude JPMorgan from restricting certain AI tools. For example, in February the firm clamped down on ChatGPT use among global employees, due to compliance concerns related to the use of third-party software.