JPMorgan CIO Lori Beer deploys AI agents across the bank with a $19.8 billion annual technology budget

Beer manages a $19.8 billion technology budget and more than 65,000 technologists at JPMorgan, where the company's tech spending accounts for roughly 10% of revenue. She is overseeing the rollout of AI agents—software that can autonomously perform tasks—across the 319,000-person workforce, with decisions on what tasks can be safely automated and which require human oversight.

JPMorgan has deployed LLM Suite (an internal version of OpenAI's ChatGPT), Connect Coach (a tool that helps asset managers extract market insights), and AI coding tools that reduce time spent in integrated development environments (software applications where programmers write and test code). Two hundred thousand employees were onboarded to LLM Suite eight months after its July 2024 debut, while 'several hundred' AI use cases are already in production.

The bank will not run these AI agents through third-party vendors—Beer says this is critical to secure the underlying flow of business and maintain control. An internal team led by Teresa Heitsenrether and Robin Leopold is working with a large academic university to re-engineer workflows across the organization, with the operating committee regularly monitoring initiatives to create 'hard value creation' in both top-line revenue and productivity gains.