On AI: Jamie Dimon's Letter to Shareholders and What it Means for Educators

(O)ur use of AI has the potential to augment virtually every job, as well as impact our workforce composition.

JP Morgan Chase CEO’s letter to shareholders reflects on advances in artificial intelligence and what those mean for society and Chase Bank.

I think some of these are relevant to education and are important for educational leaders (our educational CEOs) to think about, so I identified them here.

At the bottom, you can see the contents of the letter that are relevant to AI.

Again, if we want AI to be human-led, we have to lead it. Our students and our community members are our shareholders, and we have a responsibility to them.

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*Does your educational institution recognize that AI will likely be as consequential as the printing press, the steam engine, electricity, computing, and the Internet? Are you starting to think about what that means for operations, teaching and learning, AR/VR, homeschooling, micro schooling, how students will learn, how instruction will need to be redesigned, and opportunities for teachers?

*Are you integrating AI into your operations and workflows? How can AI be used to reduce operating costs? Schools are facing financial difficulties as pandemic relief dries up, and AI offers an opportunity to reduce costs.

*Are you prepared to train your employees so they can augment their abilities with AI? What are your plans for teacher professional development?

*Are you using AI to take advantage of rich data to identify trends you haven’t seen before to improve academic outcomes? Deep learning can autonomously discover intricate representations, capturing complex, non-linear relationships often present in real-world datasets. Deep learning models exhibit robustness to noise and variability, generalizing from incomplete or noisy data, ultimately enabling them to unveil subtle patterns that might evade traditional methods or human analysts.

*Do you have processes in place to manage AI’s downsides? AI presents challenges to existing instruction and managing AI's downsides in education necessitates careful consideration of ethical, privacy, and bias concerns, along with the need for ongoing research to ensure AI systems are transparent, accountable, and equitable. Thus, educational institutions must implement robust governance frameworks, ethical guidelines, and continuous monitoring mechanisms to mitigate potential risks and maximize the benefits of AI in education.

*Is your infrastructure protected against bad actors using AI? To safeguard against such threats, schools must implement robust cybersecurity measures, including encryption protocols, access controls, and intrusion detection systems, to protect infrastructure from unauthorized access or manipulation. Additionally, ongoing monitoring and auditing of AI systems can help detect anomalies or suspicious activities, enabling prompt response and mitigation. Moreover, comprehensive cybersecurity training for school staff and students is essential to raise awareness of potential risks and promote responsible use of AI technology. Is your school prepared?

From Jamie Dimon’s letter —

Each year, I try to update you on some of the most important issues facing our company. First and foremost, may well be the impact of artificial intelligence (AI).

While we do not know the full effect or the precise rate at which AI will change our business — or how it will affect society at large — we are completely convinced the consequences will be extraordinary and possibly as transformational as some of the major technological inventions of the past several hundred years: Think the printing press, the steam engine, electricity, computing and the Internet, among others.

THE CRITICAL IMPACT OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Since the firm first started using AI over a decade ago, and its first mention in my 2017 letter to shareholders, we have grown our AI organization materially. It now includes more than 2,000 AI/machine learning (ML) experts and data scientists. We continue to attract some of the best and brightest in this space and have an exceptional firmwide AI/ML and Research department with deep expertise.

We have been actively using predictive AI and ML for years — and now have over 400 use cases in production in areas such as marketing, fraud and risk — and they are increasingly driving real business value across our businesses and functions. We're also exploring the potential that generative AI (GenAI) can unlock across a range of domains, most notably in software engineering, customer service, and operations, as well as in general employee productivity. In the future, we envision GenAI helping us reimagine entire business workflows. We will continue to experiment with these AI and ML capabilities and implement solutions in a safe, responsible way.

While we are investing more money in our AI capabilities, many of these projects pay for themselves. Over time, we anticipate that our use of AI has the potential to augment virtually every job, as well as impact our workforce composition. It may reduce certain job categories or roles, but it may create others as well. As we have in the past, we will aggressively retrain and redeploy our talent to make sure we are taking care of our employees if they are affected by this trend.

Finally, as a global leader across businesses and regions, 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. In addition to making sure our data is high quality and easily accessible, we need to complete the migration of our analytical data estate to the public cloud. 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.

Recognizing the importance of AI to our business, we created a new position called Chief Data & Analytics Officer that sits on our Operating Committee.

Elevating this new role to the Operating Committee level — reporting directly to Daniel Pinto and me — reflects how critical this function will be going forward and how seriously we expect AI to influence our business. This will embed data and analytics into our decision making at every level of the company. The primary focus is not just on the technical aspects of AI but also on how all management can — and should — use it. Each of our lines of business has corresponding data and analytics roles so we can share best practices, develop reusable solutions that solve multiple business problems, and continuously learn and improve as the future of AI unfolds.

Clearly, AI comes with many risks, which need to be rigorously managed.

We have a robust, well-established risk and control framework that helps us proactively stay in front of AI-related risks, particularly as the regulatory landscape evolves. And we will, of course, continue to work hard with our regulators, clients and subject matter experts to make sure we maintain the highest ethical standards and are transparent in how AI helps us make decisions; e.g., to counter bias among other things.

You may already be aware that there are bad actors using AI to try to infiltrate companies’ systems to steal money and intellectual property or simply to cause disruption and damage. For our part, we incorporate AI into our toolset to counter these threats and proactively detect and mitigate their efforts.