Jamie Dimon, boss of banking giant JP Morgan, has said that AI could be as transformational as electricity, the steam engine, and the internet.

The chief executive's widely read annual letter to shareholders said that the bank was now looking into applying generative AI to applications like software engineering, customer service and operations “as well as in general employee productivity”.

The chief exec said that the use of AI “has the potential to augment virtually every job” and impact the bank's workforce composition.

“It may reduce certain job categories or roles, but it may create others as well,” he said.

He confirmed that JP Morgan now has more than 2,000 AI and machine learning (ML) focused experts and data scientists.

Dimon also highlighted that the company has recently created a new position called chief data & analytics officer that sits on the company’s operating committee and will have overriding responsibility for the technology.

JP Morgan boss outlined the risks related to the rise of AI in the letter, pointing towards how some bad actors are using it to “infiltrate companies’ systems to steal money and intellectual property or simply to cause disruption and damage”.

The chief executive said JP Morgan had already incorporated AI into its cybersecurity framework to combat this.

Outside of AI, Dimon also spoke about the importance of the cloud for the future of the bank.

According to Dimon, about 50 per cent of bank applications run a large part of their processing in the public or private cloud, and approximately 70 per cent of JP Morgan's data is now running in the public or private cloud.

But by the end of 2024, the bank said it aims to have 70 per cent of its applications and 75 per cent of data moved to the public or private cloud.

JP Morgan recently invested roughly $2 billion to build four new private cloud-based data centres in the United States last financial year.

JP Morgan is valued at around $570 billion, making it the world’s most valuable bank.

It posted a profit of $49.6 billion for its 2023 year, up 32 per cent from 2022.

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