The news: JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon flipped the vague but potent script that AI will undermine businesses’ ability to compete—including his bank’s. He argued that AI was an advantage for the bank as it planned to spend $20 billion on technology this year, up from a planned $18 billion last year. That advantage is real: AI is a productivity engine that saves the bank $2 billion per year on a $2 billion investment, according to the company.

Zoom out: Fear is driving panic. A carefully worded thought experiment posed by Citrini Research was widely circulated and triggered another panic about AI.

The report proposed that unemployment could rise substantially even as AI increases productivity. And the lack of human work would mean economic productivity would not lead to higher wages. The report also named several companies that this scenario would negatively affect, including American Express, Synchrony, and Capital One.

In addition, a panicky narrative that AI tools would eviscerate companies in the software, legal services, and financial data industries spread following Anthropic’s product announcement earlier this month.

The pace of change is almost certainly overblown—especially in banking—and enterprise AI partnerships continue:

• Anthropic just released plug-ins for its AI chatbot, Claude, developed with LSEG, Salesforce, and DocuSign.
• Goldman Sachs is working with Anthropic on AI agents to help employees more quickly onboard clients and complete trade reconciliations and other accounting tasks.
• BNY will integrate Google Gemini Enterprise into its in-house AI platform to enable research tools that draw from and act on the bank’s vast libraries of financial data.

Implications for banks: The banking industry has a multibillion dollar opportunity with genAI. The key question is whether and how the average bank will take advantage of the opportunity—or fall prey to it.

Megabanks with mature AI R&D programs and hundreds of millions to billions of dollars to invest are poised to benefit from AI with their technology strategies. Midsized and smaller banks are in a weaker position than institutions that have their own in-house AI teams. Still, these smaller banks may realize cost savings and productivity gains on a lesser scale—perhaps in partnership with AI firms rather than building from scratch.