For over a decade, Lori Beer has led the complex and ever-evolving technology operations behind JPMorganChase.
As the bank's global chief information officer, Beer's job is to effectively bring the latest technology and innovation to the bank and its 86 million active customers. Beer's department works on over 7,000 applications and nearly an
To manage the volume of technological demands from the bank, Beer oversees more than 65,000 technology employees across global technology centers in the U.S., Europe and Asia.
"The most important thing is that our tech teams are deeply embedded and aligned with our business teams," Beer told American Banker in an interview. "When you look across the broad organization of technology, we will grow in areas that the businesses need to grow."
One of the biggest areas that JPMorganChase is growing in—for both technology and business operations—is the use of artificial intelligence, which falls directly under Beer's supervision.
JPMorganChase won American Banker's
Between the launch of LLM Suite and today, Beer is already exploring the next phase of AI for the bank: specialized AI-powered programs, or "agents," that can perform tasks autonomously. Many of the bank's current AI agents, according to Beer, are being built by her own software engineer teams.
"The most important thing about building agents is making sure that you have the proper risk framework in place," she said. "If agents are going to act autonomously, we need to make sure we're putting the guardrails around what they do, and we've done that at a very fine grain level."
The largest use case for AI agents at JPMorganChase is currently on the back-end operations side, Beer said, for technical tasks such as writing code and building new software programs. Coding assistant tools have reduced the coding portion of the software development lifecycle at the bank by 10% to 20%, according to the company.
"We are one of the first organizations really seeing the significant benefits of AI changing the way we write code," Beer said. "Most code is now assisted or written with agentic coding capabilities. We're rebuilding the factory of how we create software. It's allowing some of those tasks like writing code to be less 'in the profile,' and it allows our engineers to focus on solving real business problems. That is a huge area of focus as I think about the priorities across the team."
Looking ahead, Beer anticipates that the next year or so will see many conversations on how to "mature" AI for enterprise adoption, especially around
"We're probably going to see these costs come down which allows this to be democratized, like most technologies," she said.
