Dive Brief:

• JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon stressed his commitment to cloud in his annual letter to shareholders last week. “Getting our technology to the cloud — whether the public cloud or the private cloud — is essential to fully maximize all of our capabilities, including the power of our data,” he said.
• The banking giant aims to have 75% of its data and 70% of its applications migrated to the cloud by the end of the year, Dimon said. Roughly 70% of its data and 50% of its applications now run in public or private cloud.
• Cloud adoption is part of JPMorgan's broader prioritization of data to drive artificial intelligence adoption. “In addition to making sure our data is high quality and easily accessible, we need to complete the migration of our analytics data estate to the public cloud,” Dimon said. “These new data platforms offer high-performance compute power, which will unlock our ability to use our data in ways that are hard to contemplate today.”

Dive Insight:

Dimon’s cloud enthusiasm was tied to the disruptive potential of generative AI and the data-hungry large language models that power the technology.

“We have large amounts of extraordinarily rich data that, together with AI, can fuel better insights and help us improve how we manage risk and serve our customers,” Dimon said.

JPMorgan Chase has more than 2,000 AI, machine learning and data science practitioners on its technology team and more than 400 AI use cases in production, he noted in the letter.

“We have been actively using predictive AI and ML for years,” Dimon said, noting the company is exploring additional use cases in customer service and operations, software engineering and employee productivity.

Banking stands to gain more from AI adoption than any other industry, according to an Accenture 2024 banking trends report. And cloud is crucial to scaling AI capabilities and unlocking the technology’s value, an Accenture executive said.

“When you have a business model that is fundamentally digital, the opportunity to apply the next generation of digital capabilities is unparalleled,” Michael Abbott, senior managing director and global banking lead at Accenture, told CIO Dive in January.

Cloud is the backbone of the digital enterprise and an area of heavy investment for JPMorgan Chase. The company poured $2 billion into the construction of four U.S.-based private-cloud facilities announced in 2020 and now has 32 global data centers, Dimon said.

The bank also invested in data operations, appointing Teresa Heitsenrether to the newly created chief data and analytics officer position in June.

“Elevating this new role to the Operating Committee level — reporting directly to [President and COO] Daniel Pinto and me — reflects how critical this function will be going forward and how seriously we expect AI to influence our business,” Dimon said in his letter. “This will embed data and analytics into our decision making at every level of the company.”