The Financial Times has revealed that JPMorgan Chase has given employees the option to use its in-house artificial intelligence system to help write year-end performance reviews, underscoring how AI-generated text is proliferating in corporate America.

The new tool allows employees to use the US bank’s large language model to generate a review based on prompts they give it, according to people familiar with the matter.  It is a shortcut to the often painstaking process of writing multiple reviews that are typically required by large companies.

The rollout highlights some of the potential efficiency gains from using AI, which are often based on synthesising information and generating ideas. 

But it also shows how lines are becoming increasingly blurred between text that has been written by a human and by a machine. 

Boston Consulting Group recently said that employees had used AI tools to help draft performance reviews which helped cut the writing time by 40%.  

JPMorgan’s guidance is that employees use the LLM tool as a starting point for reviews and that they are ultimately responsible for what is submitted. It is not to be used for compensation decisions.  JPMorgan declined to comment. 

JPMorgan, which has more than 300,000 employees and is the largest US bank by assets, has already rolled out LLM Suite to staff, which is its own version of OpenAI’s ChatGPT.  The bank said it had “onboarded” 200,000 users within eight months of LLM Suite’s launch last year. At the time, it was seen as one of Wall Street’s biggest AI deployments. LLM Suite was developed in-house to provide secure access to third-party AI systems.

Responding to the news, Raj Abrol, CEO of AI firm Galytix said: “It’s clear that the banking industry is warming up to the limitless power of AI to transform critical processes. However, trust remains an issue and the use of specialist AI assistants across the industry must go further, with the technology deployed in key areas such as risk and credit management to allow banks to fully reap the long term benefits.”

It is used by JPMorgan’s software developers to review code and by investment bankers preparing presentations. Its legal team also uses homegrown AI tools, for example to review contracts. Among banks, JPMorgan is the biggest spender on technology with plans to invest $18bn in 2025.

Chief executive Jamie Dimon told Bloomberg TV this month that it spent $2bn a year on AI.  Dimon said: “It affects everything — risk, fraud, marketing, idea generation, customer service. And it’s the tip of the iceberg.”

He has said that AI was “going to change every job”, eliminating some roles and creating others.  In addition to general LLM providers such as OpenAI and companies’ self-built models, there are also start-ups that are targeting specific industries such as Mosaic and Rogo, which is a chatbot that replicates work done by an investment banker. Additional reporting by Cristina Criddle