Adobe Summit 2025 – AI leadership tips from JPMorganChase CEO Jamie Dimon

AI is hard to do, but it has to be part of the DNA of all organizations, and it shouldn’t be left for the technology department to work on. This was the advice from JPMorganChase Chairman and CEO, Jamie Dimon, at the Adobe Summit in Las Vegas this week.

JPMorganChase has bet big on AI, and is already seeing big returns. The financial services firm first used AI in 2012, using an external provider. Dimon noted:

We were always big math, so when AI first started, it’s just the next generation of what I call big math, finding patterns that you couldn’t find taking different data sets, correlations that weren’t working anymore.

Dimon realised early on how important the technology would be when it was first shown to him, and he decided JPMorganChase would build its own AI. The business now has 2,000-plus AI specialists, from data scientists to machine learning and natural language processing experts. It also has 200 people working in AI research at the next level, in areas like artificial data, led by the previous head of machine learning at Carnegie Mellon. 

The number of AI uses cases at the company is growing rapidly. It might have been 450 use cases one day, and then 700 the next. Dimon said:

Some are huge, they cost a lot of money, risk, fraud, marketing, prospecting, how we do ads. It’s everything. It’s used for documents. We have an LLM inside the company now, it’ll review billions of pages of documents to answer a question you have about something inside the company. Hundreds of people use it. People in the branches use it, and it’s the tip of the iceberg.

Management 

To make AI effective, the firm’s head of AI has a seat at the management table, and every business has its own head of AI and data. Dimon explained:

[The head of AI] has data too, because data’s the hard part. It’s not machine learning or generative AI or our AGIs, it’s getting the data in a form that’s accessible. But inside the credit card company, the retail brand system, sales and trading, marketing, investment banking, payments, they all do it, it all gets mirrored. We are always asking people, what are your AI projects? As it gets used, people are coming up with more and more wonderful stuff.

One example benefit is the cost of prospecting in the commercial bank side of JPMorganChase is one tenth of what it was – not just 10% better. The benefit of that isn’t reducing the cost of having a client from $30,000 to $3,000, it’s the ability to add hundreds of new bankers effectively and quickly. Dimon said:

It’s very early stages. But it’s got to be a part of your DNA. And it’s hard. A lot of people, they don’t want to do it. They think it is the job of tech. It’s not the job of tech, it’s the job of management. You don’t have to understand exactly how it works. The really important thing to me is make it part of your mindset. Do it all the time.

Free advice 

Dimon also shared some frank advice for other business leaders.

The first is to assess everything honestly, directly and forthrightly. According to Dimon, many companies don’t do that, they’re not honest about their own performance, they ignore their competitors and they get complacent. Instead, you should be constantly assessing the landscape, doing detailed analysis, rinse and repeat, he said, adding the caveat:

And don’t try to use numbers to prove what you think, try to use numbers to understand what you’re really doing.

Tip two is choose your people wisely, and make sure they’re in the right positions. Dimon said:

A lot of people run stuff, they’re like a hot mess. They can’t get out of a paper bag, they’re always late, they don’t do their jobs, they don’t show up. They may be great people, they may be great at analysis, but just don’t let them run something because it would be a disaster.

Third is to have heart and humility. Dimon pointed out:

People know when you care about them, they know when you’re real, they know when you’re full of sh*t.

Nobody wants to work for a boss who blames them if something goes wrong, takes the credit when something goes right, and doesn’t treat everyone across the company with respect. Dimon noted:

Whether it’s the person who cleans the bathroom in the office or a CEO.

Final piece of advice from Dimon:

You’ve got to have a little bit of grit. In any of these big jobs, stuff is coming all day long and you have to say absolutely not, or absolutely, take the chance, go for it, you’ll be ok whether it works or not.

If you get those things right, you can be a pretty good leader.

Dimon also advised firms to avoid forcing customers down a certain route, and instead spend time researching what customers are doing, how they’re doing it, what they’re clicking on, what they abandon, and how adverts play into it. He added:

Sometimes we torture our customers because we think it’s great and they can’t stand it. Big companies, a lot of them die. You’ve always got to keep that in mind. Look at Sears and Kmart and some of the big tech companies, they’re all gone and in almost every single case, it’s complacency, bureaucracy, arrogance, stupidity, they’re missing the thing.

My take

So much of the discussion around AI is theoretical and potential, so it’s refreshing to hear a CEO from an industry other than tech explain so directly how crucial the technology is for its business. And although Dimon didn’t explicitly reference this, kudos to JPMorganChase for appointing women to key tech roles: Lori Beer, Global CIO; Manuela Veloso, Head of AI Research; and Terah Lyons, Global Head of AI & Data Policy.