[Applause] [Jamie Dimon] JPMorganChase today is 3,000 companies. The most important thing that we've done over the years is that people who end up running these big divisions, they have heart and empathy. [Music] [Jenn Piepszak] Our culture is so important because I really believe it can be our greatest competitive advantage. [Teresa Heitsenrether] Wherever we operate we do the right thing, and we deliver the relationships over decades that make us the bank that clients trust, respect and rely on. [Doug Petno] Our clients are the ones with the dream. We're there to help cultivate that dream.
[Mary Erdoes] The best thing about JPMorganChase is we're not fair-weathered friends. We work hard in good times and in bad to be there for our clients on the ground. [Lori Beer] We have over 60,000 technologists, they really allow us to deliver at a global scale. [Marianne Lake] We're investing in our communities through hiring community managers, community home lending advisors, and lifting up the communities in which we operate. [Jamie Dimon] We bank cities, universities, pensions, states, governments, countries. Lifting up civic society is the job of all of us. And we just never stop. [Music] [Applause] [Shantanu Narayen] Good morning. Good morning, welcome. Welcome to Adobe Summit day 2. Did folks have a good day on day 1? [Applause] [Shantanu Narayen] Well, few names in finance command the respect and influence of Jamie Dimon. As chair and CEO, Jamie not only manages the nation's largest bank and just some numbers, managing $4 trillion in assets and moving over $10 trillion every day, but actually shapes the global financial landscape through resilience, strategic vision and an unrelenting commitment to innovation. From navigating economic crises to championing leadership in business, Jamie's insights extend far beyond Wall Street, impacting industries, economies and, frankly, the global economy. So please join me in again welcoming Jamie to Adobe Summit. Thanks for joining us. [Jamie Dimon] Thank you. [Applause] [Shantanu Narayen] Love to start with leadership, Jamie, and you've had such an incredible and storied career certainly American Express, Traveler, Smith and then Bank One, which, understanding you also potentially looked at a couple of other companies. So maybe how do you think about leadership and what has happened in your journey that's helped develop you as a leader? [Jamie Dimon] Thank you, so first of all, welcome. Shantanu, thank you for having me here. Congratulations on all of your success. I have to confess, I'm not used to speaking in front of 12,000 people. And so I... Leadership, I mean, I'll just give you the basics. And I think there're four quick things. One is assess everything, honestly, directly, forthrightly. A lot of companies don't do that. They're not honest about their own performance. They don't look at competitors. They get kind of complacent. They're making a lot of money. So you're constantly assessing the landscape, detailed analysis, repeat, rinse and don't try to use numbers to prove what you think, try to use numbers to understand what you're really doing. The second is 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, people don't know their jobs. They don't show up. They may be great people. They may be great at analysists but just don't let them run something because it would be a disaster. And the third, which I think is a little bit different, is heart and humility. People know whether you care about them. They know whether you're real. They know when you're full of ****. They know all those things. People don't want work at a leader level for someone who's going to blame them if something goes wrong, takes credit when something goes right, who doesn't treat everyone across the company with respect, whether it's the person who cleaned the bathrooms in the office or a CEO. And the fourth is you've got to have a little bit of grit. I mean, in any of these big jobs, man, stuff is coming all day long, and you have to be able to say absolutely not, or, absolutely, take the chance. Go for it. You'll be okay whether it works or not. So, if you do those things right, you could be a pretty good leader. [Shantanu Narayen] I know you've also talked about balance for us all as leaders. Maybe just before we get into the economy and other issues, how do you think about balance at the executive level? [Jamie Dimon] Yes, well, I'll tell you what I think, but I wasn't always good at it. So don't assume I was good at it. I think you all have to take care of your mind, your body, your spirit, your soul, your friends, your family. We can't do that. We can help. We can create more flexibility. We can do a lot of things and make sure, but you've got to do it yourself. And you have to, so I pretty much like work and do family. That's my kind of balance. You don't see me at Black Ties or things like that. And so, but it is important. If you don't recharge, if you don't get your rest, you're going to get sick. You're not going to be good at anything. You're going to damage your health. And so, yes, you've got to fight for it. And those things you fight for, for some of us it's a walk in the woods or reading a book or just going to dinner with friends or something like that. But I think what people really should do is just make it part of how they plan as opposed to get around to it, filling it in around all your work and stuff like that. And I remember when I was a young parent, I started to make an X. I put stuff down for my kids on my calendar like anything else. And I did it like anything else. I really canceled anything. And that could be a soccer game, or it could be a, I didn't like parent-teacher stuff basically.
But if you do it right, you can have it all. You just can't have it all, if you're late, you're hurried, you're touching, you're always grabbing your hair. And if you're very thoughtful of your calendar, I think you can actually do both. And it's obviously really hard when you have kids. That is when it really becomes a tough thing, when you have young kids. [Shantanu Narayen] I think the question on everybody's mind is what's happening with the global economy. And so just maybe, how you see the global economy evolve and the challenges and opportunities over the next few years? [Jamie Dimon] So we can start with the U.S. The U.S. economy since COVID has been on a really good ride. I'm going to give you a significant but, okay? And I don't mean a minor but, I call it a significant but, but the rise have been pretty good, we've been growing at 2-2.5% a year. Companies, individuals have money, they're spending it. And what happened is during COVID, we spent $6 trillion. And since then we borrowed and spent another 4. So part of the exceptionalism, we are an exceptional nation, is the spending. And it went into people's pocketbooks, it went to companies and went to states. You're talking about unbelievable sums of money which are basically being spent down. So if you look at it today, consumers at the low end basically spend it down and they're starting to do what I call traditional things when they need some extra money, which is canceling a trip, going to a cheaper restaurant, etc. people at the high-end still their money's down a lot, but they are much wealthier. Think of homes and stock prices over the last 20 years, and a very important point for all of us in the room is the bottom 20% didn't get a pay raise for 25 years. They're dying younger. Their schools aren't good. They live in crime-ridden neighborhoods and we've created a huge problem, which I think causes some of the polarization. So the economy is still in that soft landing thing, but a lot of turbulence out there. QE, I'm not quite sure what that means, tariffs, it will definitely have pluses and minuses. And you see consternation around the world. What's going to happen to the tax plan I personally think the most important thing happening in the world is what's happening in Ukraine and Russia and the Middle East. That's about the future of the free democratic world. But I think this turbulence could force this soft... So we're in this soft landing, in a completely different direction. So I'm a little cautious about that direction that somehow everything's going to be hunky dory. We're so used to it. But things happen that people don't expect. So hopefully it'll continue. Hopefully inflation will come down. The other thing I'll say about inflation, when I look at the world, I always try to look at future facts. What's going to happen in the future that determines what's happening in the future, not what you see today. I think people make a mistake to look at inflation, the last report, everything I see is inflationary. The re-militarization of the world, the unbelievable fiscal spending around the world, it's not just the US, though we are the worst by far, But it's literally around the world, the extent of debt outstanding out there. The green economy is going to cost a lot of money. Restructuring trade, however it happens, is going to cost money and cause a little bit of inflation. So there are a lot of inflationary forces and we look at long-term trends. The long-term trend might be higher rates, more inflation, a lot of demand for capital. Like Europe alone to meet what they need to meet for military spending, 300 or $400 billion more a year. And I think we're going to be spending a lot more military, too. So we'll see, I mean, I always hope for the best. And as a businessperson, I kind of plan for all potential outcomes. [Shantanu Narayen] Well, I'm an optimist, Jamie, and let's switch maybe a little. A lot of the folks in the room are business managers, they're thinking about innovation. And a lot of people may not realize you have over 300,000 employees, across 170 offices in 100 countries. And you've expanded beyond strictly finance to things like lifestyle businesses, whether it's Chase Connected, Commerce, Chase travel, maybe just how you think about innovation at a company of that scale. [Jamie Dimon] So the way I look at innovation in the writ large, technology has driven almost all the change for mankind Whether it's agriculture, printing, engine, steel, ceramics, internet. And I put AI in the same category, but my bottom line is that technology innovation should be at the management tables. Lori Beer who runs CIO, the woman who runs artificial intelligence, they report to me and the president there at the table, whenever we meet as businesses. This has been true my whole life. What are you doing? What are you building, how you're competing? How are you using new technology, new computers? How are you using Adobe? We're one of the bigger users of Adobe, like constantly with cyber, and so if you were in a business with us, you'd see people's big ideas around AI, they're big ideas around this. It will drive everything. It has changed business, as you know, it's going to change a lot of different things. But around the spectrum of AI I think a bank like us is data, I call it the adjacency. So we mentioned travel connected commerce. You know, now if you're a Chase card owner or Chase account owner, we're using those things to offer you travel packages. We have a travel agency to make your life better. And unlike some other companies out there in social media, we want to offer you what you want. We can give you a menu, so you can say, I'd like to see golf stuff. I like to see travel. I like European travel, but not just bombard you with ads and stuff like that. So we're going to use that, all these adjacencies to make your life easier. It could be your payment systems, fraud, marketing. We have programable currency movements where folks like you move money around the world. It's automatically done in the currency you want, at the timetable you want, in the month you want, the day you want. And so this will be great for everybody. The really important thing to me is to make it part of your mindset. Do it all the time. And I do think AI is going to change the world. AI is like the internet. I remind people the internet was invented in 1968. The steam engine took a long time to roll out. Electricity took a long time to roll out, but it will roll out. It'll be a different path we all expect today, faster, slower, open, closed, cheaper, better. But as a user it'll be huge. [Shantanu Narayen] We are going to talk about AI, and I'll get to that. But prior to that you touched on consumers and choice. How do you at JPMorganChase think about consumer centricity and consumer experiences. [Jamie Dimon] I always start, and I think, like you, is a business should always look at itself from the point of view of the consumer. And I bought a lot of companies, I've been a lot of places. And when you sit in the meeting, it's about them. What are we doing and what are they doing? It's not about the consumer. Like how do you want? You're going to vote with your feet, folks. Whether it's a restaurant or a bank or something like that. And so you should always be looking at it that way. And you should look at the competitors that way. What do they do to offer people? And then you know the detail when you say, deal with the consumer, it's at every single level. You guys, the experts in how you deal with them, the consumer side, it's what they see. It's how their sales takes place. It's how we could be using agents to send you new cards when your card has been lost. But everything you do has to be from the point better, faster, quicker. And you have some companies who are exceptional at this. I remember talking to Jeff Bezos years ago and he was talking about the swiping, they are looking at milliseconds, how long it takes to do something. I went back and forth, and said, hey, what are our milliseconds. So that's what you have to do because that's the thing, big companies, there's always competition. And they're looking at everything you do, what they can do better and they should. That's the beauty of capitalism. So you have to do it all the time everywhere you go. And most people in the company, the other thing I point out, internal stuff is always consumer too. So you have all these bureaucracies inside these companies that slow things down. They're chatting about this, they're wasting a lot of time. That's bad for the customer, too, so I'd say, treat people, your own employees like they're customers, too. How you need product and service to make their lives easier.
[Shantanu Narayen] At the scale at which you are, and you're trying to drive this globally, a lot of companies talk about what do you do centrally, and how do you think about rolling this out globally. So maybe just again, the role of marketing as well as how you think about global expansion of consumer centricity. [Jamie Dimon] So, marketing. I look at marketing writ large because you know when you started, marketing was ads in the heads. I remember years ago buying Time Life Magazine and with a list, market that list with high-net-worth people. Now it's far more sophisticated than that. And as you know, you guys do a lot of the work. What are people doing, how are they doing it? Where are they clicking on, what have they abandoned? What do they see, how do the ads play into it? How do the ads in the city play into it? Where do you link a product that makes sense? Sometimes we torture our customers because we think it's great and they can't stand it. And so you have to do marketing writ large.
Big companies, a lot of them die. And you always got to keep that in mind, which is and you can look at Sears and Kmart, and some of the big tech companies, they're all gone. Almost every single case is complacency, bureaucracy, arrogance, stupidity. They're missing the thing. They're looking at the company from their own standpoint and they over-centralize. So if you go to a company where the staff is running the company, short the stock. The authority belongs as close to the ground as you can be, like a branch, like, of course there's risk. We're bank, if a branch does something wrong, I mean we can get in big trouble, but if you centralize everything to minimize every risk of you making a mistake, so you want the branch manager, the CEOs of businesses to have the ability, not to override a major decision, but to question every major decision. So that's true for every country. We give a lot more authority to our senior country officers. So in every country I go to when I go to India, I ask them what do you want to do a better job for India using our JPMorgan resource in your country. And that answer's always different than the people in New York or London say, or the people in Hong Kong, or the people who run Asia, always different. Because the people who run New York are saying, we're going to spend money in equity research, India is not as important as so and so. My view is just like the technology, constant investing in overseas area by area, the whole management team talks about every single thing. There are no meetings after meetings. It's all the dead catch on the table and challenge yourself all the time. And you can hopefully avoid the disease that kills companies. [Shantanu Narayen] It was fascinating to hear you talk about how technology has always played such a big role in the evolution of the company, as well as AI specifically, and having them on your staff. I think it's fair to say, 2024 was probably the year of AI, and it's still continuing, and you hear new messages every day, new LLMs. I mean, how do you think about AI both in finance and how do you approach even, how you use AI within the context of financial services? [Jamie Dimon] So, first of all, we were always Big Math. So when AI first started, just the next generation I call Big Math, it was finding patterns that you couldn't find taking different data sets. That your correlations weren't working anymore. But we first used AI in 2012, and we used some outside people to do it and when it was first shown to me, I said, no, we're going to build our own. So we have 2000, maybe more, people doing that today, data scientist, AI, machine learning, natural language projects. We have 200 people in AI research at the next level, artificial data and various things. And the woman who runs that ran machine learning at Carnegie Mellon. And they can go into any department literally, and look at how you do stuff and walk out, make a few changes. So we have 2000 people, I'm going to say 450 use cases. But yesterday I'm going to say it's probably 700 today. Some are huge. They cost a lot of money, risk, fraud, marketing, prospecting, how do we do Edge, how we run, it's everything. It's used for documents. We have an LLM inside the company now. So it'll review billions of pages of documents to answer a question that 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. But the way I think you make it effective is the woman who runs the company is at the management table, and there's a mirror inside every business. So there's a head of AI and data, and she has data too, because data is the hard part. It's not machine learning or generative AI or AGI. It's getting the data in a form that's accessible. But inside the credit card company, the retail branch system, sales and trading, marketing, investment banking, payments, they all do it. It all gets mirrored. And like I said, we are just always asking people, what are your AI projects? So I can call anyone on the phone today and say, what are your top five? And as people, as it gets used, people are coming up with more and more wonderful stuff. And so it's got to be part of your DNA. And it's hard, a lot of people, they don't want to do it. They think it's 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, guys. It can do what? Our cost of prospecting now in the commercial bank is one tenth of what it was, not 10% better. The benefit of that isn't that it the reduced the cost of having a client from 30,000 to 3000, we could add hundreds of new bankers effectively, quickly. So that's the benefit, and like I said, it's at the very early stages. [Shantanu Narayen] A lot of people talk about the plus side of technology and the potential things to watch out for. So maybe you talked a lot about data in that particular context. Just, how you think about data and privacy and having sort of the North star of how JPMorganChase deals with that as well on behalf of consumers? [Jamie Dimon] The other thing about AI, and it will be regulated and legislated and all that. And it should be hopefully done properly because they could squash innovation. But it's going to be used by bad guys no different than drugs, cars, airplanes. And we have to be prepared for that. I mean, and so we use a lot of AI to combat fraud and to combat bad guys on cyber and stuff like that.
We have, by law, banks can share data. So if you called me up and said, show me the people who do A, B, and C, I can't do that. I can anonymize and have you send them an ad. So we're going to reverse engineer that. It'll be like, think of reverse engineering Google. You can call me up and say, I want to know people who like to ski on this month, they have a lot of money, they do all these things, they have kids and we can shoot to ask them or something like that. So it's very valuable, but we believe it's your data. You get to decide, a lot of your data, your banks, some of that data has been taken by outside third parties and sold, and I think that's wrong. You should decide what to give third parties, how to give it to them. There's a liability transfer, it happens. So we try to protect your money from fraud and scams and God knows things. But once the data is outside and a lot of you believe in not giving your bank account information to a third-party, who uses that to do things that would surprise you, and they're sucking out the data, some of them are taking it literally every 10 seconds from a JPMorgan which also costs us money. We're big into fraud protection, data protection and then use it to help you. And I think we should be doing the same thing in healthcare, by the way. It should be your data, shouldn't belong to healthcare companies. The usage of data wall of healthcare that you give to whoever you want, to the services you want. [Applause] [Shantanu Narayen] I think a common theme of what you clearly talking about, Jamie, is sort of the respect for the individual and trust. But what's been inspiring, as I've read more about JPMorgan, is how you've used the power of JPMorgan to rebuild cities. You've done it in Detroit, you're continuing to do it DC, in Chicago. So maybe, at the scale at which you are, the role that purpose and culture plays in the evolution of JPMorgan. [Jamie Dimon] Well, I never used to use that word because I don't like a lot of BS and purpose. A lot of companies say, our purpose is to do the best job for clients and employees while serving society. It doesn't mean anything unless you actually do it. But that is our job. We finance countries around the world, we finance individuals, cities, states, schools, hospital, governments, our military, the biggest companies, the richest people in the world, we reach out everywhere. So we have special programs to reach out to veterans and minorities and inner cities. Some by law, we're required under current banking law to do certain things. But at the end of the day, and I, my grandparents, are Greek immigrants, never finished high school. But you learn, you have a purpose in life. And I think a lot of people, and your purpose in life could be run a company, be an artist, be a politician, it could be just a wonderful parent, and do it as well as you can do it and make the world a better place. And so this is my contribution. But since JP was all around the world, one of the things that we get to see and we spend, a billion and a half, almost $2 billion in various types of research. What does the world do and what works? So when we went to Detroit. Detroit was one of the few American cities that hadn't had a renaissance. And the mayor was a white guy elected in an 80% black town on a write-in vote. And he went to all the neighborhoods and had them in the living rooms. And I heard about this guy, called him up. He thought it was a prank call. And I said, we are one of the biggest banks in Detroit. I said, we want to help. And this kind of spawned a lot of stuff for us. So we send in teams of people. So instead of consumer bank, investment bank, private bank, one group of people led by a guy called Peter Shear, what do you need? And so we learned things about affordable housing. We started a virtual call center in Detroit, it's got 150 people and they love it. They make money, they never thought that they would work for a bank. They find it fun working for a bank. Some have been promoted now. We learned about how to do work skills. We learned how to do work skills from Switzerland and Germany. How do you get kids certificates that get them jobs? We learned how to do better jobs at affordable housing? And so it kind of spawned these things. And community outreach is what we do, and I think, by the way, if you were a small bank in a small town or a bakery shop, that's what you do too. You bring the food to a homeless shelter at the end of the day. You help your community, it's called humanity. There's nothing wrong with it, and we just do it on a big scale. I also think about a big company, the notion you should be heartless and nameless and stuff like that, that's terrible. I want JPMorgan in Las Vegas to respect everyone here, and the people in Las Vegas say we are better of with JPMorgan being here. And if JPMorgan makes a mistake, we acknowledge it and fix it. God knows we make plenty of mistakes. So it's just part of what we do. And I think a lot of companies do, and have a lot of programs to help the societies, both that they're in and around the world. [Shantanu Narayen] But let's, yes. [Applause] [Shantanu Narayen] It's hard to top that. I will say, Jamie, what you and JPMorgan have done is inspiring for businesses, and personally, what you've done for leadership and inspiring a whole bunch of the next generation of leaders, it's been a privilege getting to know you. Thank you so much. [Jamie Dimon] Shantanu, thank you, congratulations. Thank you, folks, have a great time, while you are here. [Applause] [Shantanu Narayen] Thank you so much.
