JPMorgan Chase builds ambitious AI foundation on AWS

JPMorgan Chase & Co. has deployed an internal AI assistant dubbed LLM Suite to more than 200,000 employees and is generating genuine value from its early AI investments.

At AWS re:Invent Tuesday, JPMorgan Chase Global CIO Lori Beer detailed the evolving partnership between the financial services giant and AWS, which finds JPMorgan pushing the AWS SageMaker machine learning platform and AWS Bedrock generative AI platform beyond experimentation into production applications.

“We’re already seeing value from some LLM Suite use cases,” Beer said at the conference. “Our bankers and advisors receive AI-generated ideas to better engage with clients. Our travel agents leverage LLMs to help build and book trip itineraries for our customers. Our contact center reps summarize call transcripts and provide insights at scale. And our developers are using AI code generation tools. We are currently exploring ways to leverage developer AI agents in parallel.”

As part of its $17 billion investment in technology, JPMorgan Chase is not shying away from generative AI — though many financial services companies are tight-lipped about production use. “There’s never been a more exciting time to be leading an enterprise through a transformation,” Beer said. “I’m excited for the next wave of technology evolution.”

Amazon announced several enhancements to its Bedrock GenAI platform at its conference this week, including reducing hallucinations and better security guardrails — factors which have prevented many enterprises – particularly financial service giants – from moving out of proof of concept (POC) experimentation and into production.

JP Morgan Chase has turned the corner on those fears. “Today, we’re actively unlocking gen AI use cases and working with AWS on their Bedrock roadmap,” said Beer, who also spoke at AWS re:Invent four years ago when the company had 100 applications on AWS.

 “We have architected on the cloud [and it] has allowed us to modernize our business platforms and build brand new ones, enabling us to continuously innovate. Three examples of modernization can be seen in our markets and payments businesses, as well as Chase.com for flagship platforms and markets and payments, massive amounts of elastic compute and modern cloud services have helped us analyze risk and market volatility,” she said.

“Modernization on AWS’ [Elastic Compute Cloud] enables us to be one of the largest payment processors in the world,” the Global CIO added.

Two years ago, JPMorgan Chase migrated its Chase.com consumer application and mobile application to AWS, reducing costs and increasing resiliency, Beer said, adding that this was accomplished by using active configuration capabilities across multiple AWS regions.

 “The strong resiliency posture allows two out of three regions to fail without customer impact, but geo-optimized routing also improved our overall customer experience,” Beer said. “Our strong partnership with AWS ensures that the infrastructure stack is frequently and automatically refreshed to improve our risk and resiliency posture and meet our security controls.”

The cloud advantage

JPMorgan Chase’s cloud journey with AWS began in 2020, and the launch of its consumer bank Chase in the UK was “built from the ground up on AWS,” Beer said. In 2023, the company had nearly 1,000 applications running on AWS, including core services such as deposits and payments. JPMorgan has also made use of AWS Graviton processors as part of the tightknit partnership.

The 225-year-old company runs about 50% of all e-commerce transactions in the US, playing a major role during Black Friday and Cyber Monday mega sales this past weekend. “This is why we have been reinventing the way we build global banking and payments infrastructure, and why we’ve pushed the element of the art of the possible in the cloud,” she said.

In a recent interview with CIO, Chase CIO Gill Haus agreed that most credit card transactions are still “touched” by the mainframe, but he noted that the development of Chase’s deposit platform offers the company more opportunities for e-commerce transactions on private and public clouds.

Expanding its partnership for AI

Beer also elaborated on JPMorgan Chase’s evolving collaboration on data and analytics, which dovetails with several AWS enhancements and products announced at re:Invent. Chief among those announcements include the SageMaker Unified Studio, which will give developers a single view of enterprise data, and SageMaker LakeHouse.

JPMorgan Chase has, for example, launched a new business that leverages AWS Fusion to provide a data management platform and analytics across investment lifecycles, improving interoperability across multiple data sources and providing institutional clients’ access to extensive foundations of data at scale, Beer said.

“We have nearly an exabyte of data, which makes it one of our most critical assets, especially as we increasingly embed AI in the way we modernize and build our technology with the help of AWS data management tools like [AWS] Glue. Our data is discoverable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable on our secure end to end data and AI platform,” Beer said.

JPMorgan Chase’s data and AI platform is “empowering us to build the next wave of AI applications,” according to Beer.

“SageMaker is helping us simplify the model development lifecycle from experimentation to model deployment in production,” she said. “It is the foundation of our firm-wide AI platform, which we designed to be repeatable with an extensible architecture, so that our data scientists can leverage a range of best-in-class solutions from the ecosystem.”

Beer said 5,000 company employees use SageMaker.

With more than 200,000 employees now using the LLM Suite, the collaboration is expanding.

“We’re now starting to explore Bedrock with the goal of providing data scientists with seamless access to more models that can be finetuned on our data,” Beer says. “Our goal is to use gen AI at scale, and we continue to learn how to best leverage these new innovative capabilities within the regulated enterprise.”

The global CIO said the firm’s partnership with AWS ensures that the infrastructure stack is frequently and automatically refreshed to improve the company’s risk and resiliency posture and to meet its security controls.

“While the industry has evolved dramatically over the past four years, the core principles of our cloud program have not. We are still focused on establishing a strong security foundation that is resilient and represents our robust regulatory framework, prioritizing modernization across both the business and technology, enabling innovative services like AI and serverless to drive new product development and accelerate our go to market, being thoughtful and prioritizing migration for the most impactful use cases,” Beer concluded.