How JPMorgan’s CIO is reshaping work at the bank with a $19.8 billion annual tech and AI budget

Lori Beer, the global chief information officer at JPMorgan Chase & Co., has a long checklist of questions as she navigates the proliferation of AI agents working alongside the banking giant’s sprawling workforce of 319,000. AI agents, Beer says, will change the way one thinks about work, the tasks to complete that work, how to break those tasks down, the tasks the bank is comfortable automating, the tasks that require human reflection, and then the proper technology ecosystem with the proper security, resiliency, and controls. “We have been focusing very early on, on simple things, like what’s the right level to create an agent; how do you give them identity and access?” says Beer. Her approach is fairly flexible. In HR, a human has broader license to see JPMorgan employee data than an agent. “You don’t want them to go outside the bounds of the specific tasks that they can do, because they don’t have the same thinking a human does,” says Beer. But in software engineering, there’s a bit more pliability with the permissions granted to an AI agent, because there’s a validation layer to check and correct any errors those autonomous systems could generate. That same monitoring layer will need to be applied to other parts of the business as agents are increasingly embraced, says Beer, which involves keeping the human in the loop but also monitoring the outputs that large language models are producing. One clear certainty when it comes to JPMorgan’s agentic AI strategy is that these tools won’t run through a third-party vendor. “This is going to be critical, because it’s the underlying flow of how we do business,” she says. “We want to secure it and we want to make sure it’s organized.” Beer, a 12-year veteran at the No. 11-ranked Fortune 500 bank, manages a technology budget of $19.8 billion and more than 65,000 technologists who support JPMorgan’s retail, wholesale, and asset and wealth management businesses. The company’s tech spending accounts for roughly 10% of