Banks spend on AI workflows

Wall Street’s biggest banks are putting artificial intelligence into back-office and employee tools, not handing trading desks over to machines. (businessinsider.com) Business Insider reported on April 18 that JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Citi and Bank of America are spending billions of dollars on AI projects aimed at changing how employees work day to day. The focus is on internal workflows such as summarising calls, extracting data from documents and helping staff search research faster. (businessinsider.com) JPMorgan told investors at its May 19, 2025 Investor Day that its total technology spend for 2025 was still “approximately $18 billion,” up about $1 billion year on year, as it updated investors on firmwide technology and AI strategy. The bank has also built internal artificial intelligence research and tooling programs rather than pitching autonomous trading systems to investors. (jpmorganchase.com, jpmorgan.com) Goldman Sachs rolled out its GS AI assistant to about 10,000 employees by January 2025, with a plan to reach all knowledge workers that year. The tool was built to handle tasks such as summarising emails, proofreading text and translating code from one programming language to another. (cnbc.com) Goldman’s 2025 annual report said the firm launched “One Goldman Sachs 3.0,” a new operating model “propelled by AI,” and said the bank expected productivity gains it could reinvest in client work. That language pushed AI into the firm’s operating model, not just its research notes or pilot projects. (goldmansachs.com) Citi’s 2025 annual report said its Services division was deploying a CitiService Agent Assist tool to answer client inquiries faster and more accurately, while its Markets business was using AI to automate trade confirmations. In third-quarter 2025 results, Citi said use of its two enterprise-wide generative AI tools reached about 7 million utilizations year to date, roughly triple the prior quarter. (citigroup.com, citigroup.com) Bank of America said on April 8, 2025 that more than 90% of its employees were using Erica for Employees, its internal AI assistant. The bank said the tool had cut calls to its information-technology service desk by more than 50%. (bankofamerica.com) That work reflects a narrower definition of AI success on Wall Street than the one popular when ChatGPT first spread through finance in 2023. Instead of promising self-directed dealmaking or fully automated trading, banks are measuring gains in minutes saved on service requests, document handling and employee research. (businessinsider.com, bankofamerica.com, citigroup.com) Morgan Stanley Research made a similar point in a separate report on software developers, arguing that AI coding tools are changing how work gets done rather than simply eliminating jobs. Its researchers said the software development market could grow at a 20% annual rate to $61 billion by 2029 as AI speeds up code generation but still leaves review and integration work to experienced engineers. (morganstanley.com) For banks, that means the near-term AI race is being fought in internal systems, expense budgets and employee desktops. The firms spending the most are betting that the first payoff will come from smoother workflows inside the bank, long before any machine runs Wall Street on its own. (businessinsider.com, goldmansachs.com, jpmorganchase.com)