JPMorgan's new AI agents can work for hours without human input

JPMorgan Chase plans to debut upgraded AI agents later this year that can operate autonomously for hours at a time without requiring human intervention.

The more powerful AI agents evolving inside JPMorgan, “suggests the technology is close to clearing the security and governance hurdles that have slowed adoption inside large companies,” according to CNBC banking reporter Hugh Son. 

“We’ve entered now the era of long-running autonomous agents,” Derek Waldron, JPMorgan's chief analytics officer, told CNBC. “[That] means that agents don’t just run for two or three minutes to carry out a goal or some instructions of a human, they can run for an hour or two.”

JPMorgan is the biggest U.S. bank by assets and has a nearly $20 billion annual technology budget. In private banking, AI systems can analyze market activity, client positions and research overnight to help bankers focus on client interactions. JPMorgan has seen a 20% increase in private banking gross sales because of AI tools, and is expected to eventually allow individual bankers to expand client coverage by as much as 50%, according to CNBC.

Eventually, AI agents will remain coherent for “multiple hours, then days, then weeks,” Waldron said, adding new models will serve as more of a “team manager than an individual worker,” he said. “Just like how people function, team managers can parse out a problem and delegate activities, and teams can run for a lot longer to do more complex things.”

Anthropic, the maker of Claude, has released AI agents for financial services while partnering with advisor networks LPL and Orion. Wall Street giants Blackstone, private-equity firm Hellman & Friedman, and Goldman Sachs announced a joint venture with Anthropic last month to form a new AI services company. 

Robinhood launched third-party AI agents a couple weeks ago that can autonomously execute equity trades and make credit card purchases for retail investors. At a conference hosted last week by TradePMR, the RIA custodian owned by Robinhood, executives downplayed the possible usage of financial advisors using AI agents to trade holdings on behalf of clients.

“I don't think that'll happen quick. We've rolled out the AI agent, we're in a really early stages so far it's only equity trading, we'll go across all asset classes,” said Robinhood’s chief brokerage officer Steve Quirk. “What we see far more use in is people having AI help them either understand why the market's moving, find opportunities, do scans for stocks, and then doing the investing either on their own, or, having somebody do it for them in a managed portfolio.”

Robinhood’s Robb Baldwin, founder of TradePMR, said AI trading for advisors will not come until regulations are updated.

“Right now we can't do that in this space. RIAs aren't allowed to hire an AI agent to manage money for customers at this point in time, because it doesn't suit the rules currently. So you won't see it until that changes,” Baldwin told InvestmentNews.