Dive Brief:

• As the financial sector moves forward with AI plans, banks added governance and ethical use expertise to their workforces last year, according to research by Evident Insights. Out of 50 large banks surveyed, 41 had dedicated AI governance professionals in Q4 2024, up from 31 the prior year, the industry research firm said in a Wednesday report.
• Banks are standing up AI risk and governance groups to further ensure safe and responsible artificial intelligence implementation. More than half of the banks tracked by Evident Insights have established AI oversight teams. Executive-level AI governance positions exist at 33 of the banks surveyed, up from 15 in 2023, the analysis found.
• Leading banks are conducting responsible AI research in-house to help guide adoption. JPMorgan Chase has published the most research on the topic in the past three years, a period that saw the overall number of responsible AI research papers by banks surveyed increase by 136%.

Dive Insight:

Banking emerged as a nexus of generative AI experimentation and adoption last year, with some of the sector's largest players deploying large language model-powered technologies.

JPMorgan rolled out the LLM Suite AI assistant to 140,000 employees in September, and Morgan Stanley leaned on OpenAI to launch its AskResearchGPT chatbot internally the following month.

The technology gained additional traction in the industry this year, as Citi equipped 30,000 of its developers with generative AI coding tools, and BNY expanded its partnership with OpenAI in an ongoing effort to build out its Microsoft Copilot-enabled Eliza generative AI platform.

Generative AI is poised for a breakthrough in banking, according to a January report from IBM’s Institute for Business Value. While tactical adoption was the norm last year, with three-quarters of banks IBM surveyed in the early phases of deployment, maturity is on the horizon.

“We are seeing a significant shift in how generative AI is being deployed across the banking industry as institutions shift from broad experimentation to a strategic enterprise approach that prioritizes targeted applications,” Shanker Ramamurthy, IBM Consulting’s global managing director of banking and financial markets, said in the report.

Evident Insight’s research highlights the role leadership, governance and risk controls will play in adoption strategies. Responsible AI talent, a category that includes governance, risk and ethics specialists, comprises a small fraction of the financial sector’s AI workforce, numbering 247 individuals across 50 banks in Q4 2024.

JPMorgan, which led the industry in AI adoption last year according to Evident Insights’ AI Index, had 20 professionals in governance roles, nearly triple the average. The bank filed a patent application for a model bias risk assessment tool, as part of its responsible AI research initiatives, Evident Insights noted in the Wednesday report.

During an earnings call last year, JPMorgan CFO Jeremy Barnum said the company prioritized a “pragmatic and disciplined” approach to adoption.