How JPMorgan Chase is preparing the workforce for the future of AI

This story originally appeared in the San Francisco Business Times

In his 2023 Annual Letter to Shareholders, JPMorgan Chase Chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon predicted AI’s impact “will be extraordinary and possibly as transformational as some of the major technological inventions of the past several hundred years.”

Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, this transformation is even more pronounced. Home to 20 of the best funded AI companies in the country, we are at the center of this technological transformation. We are focused on upskilling our workforce and believe there’s an opportunity to upskill San Francisco’s local workforce as well.

The city is once again a main character in tech’s next big story. We’ve seen that by investing in and supporting the local workforce, we can ensure local residents obtain the skills and experience necessary to succeed in the labor market and contribute to a stronger more inclusive economy.

For us, we’ve seen remarkable opportunity in other great cities. As a result, we’ve worked with municipalities over the years addressing local workforce needs in the face of profound transformation by developing long-term solutions that offer skills, training, and stability.

For example, in Baltimore, we partnered with its mayor to source and hire call center specialists and leaders to help our customers manage their financial accounts. These full-time, home-based roles provide local residents with opportunities for career growth, a steady income, and health and wellness benefits. In Greater Washington, D.C., we committed $5.3 million to the Talent Ready Initiative to strengthen the region’s skilled workforce to help meet the growing demand for IT talent in the nation’s capital. So far, this program has supported over 25,000 D.C. area high school students in career pathways. And in Detroit, to help combat the high rate of unemployment, we collaborated with local government, community organizations, and private sector partners to create Detroit at Work – a single point of entry into the workforce system, intentionally designed for the realities of the city’s labor market.

And while every city’s strengths and challenges are different, we have identified three focus areas we consistently find provide meaningful impact and a path forward to advancing opportunity and the local workforce, in other markets, as well as in San Francisco.

1. Expand access to apprenticeships: In less than a decade, one-third of the United States workforce will need to learn new skills and find work in new occupations, including in AI. To combat the skills imbalance, we provide youth and adult apprenticeships in various areas such as technology, business operations, and finance. Additionally, we supported federal legislation, including the National Apprenticeship Act to help modernize and expand apprenticeships into growth industries and expand access for disadvantaged and underrepresented individuals, including students and workers.
2. Reduce barriers and develop skills: Our $350 million global workforce investment has enabled us to pilot new education and training programs, improve collaboration among employers and educational institutions, and publicize actionable labor market data and research. As part of this commitment, we provided $1.5 million in philanthropic capital to the Bay Area’s Tech Equity Collective to gather quantitative and qualitative insights that led to greater diversity and equity in the tech sector.
3. Sustain a diverse and inclusive workforce: Diverse views and ideas allow us to constantly innovate, maintain competitiveness, avoid the status quo, better perform, and increase profitability. We invest $300 million in employee training each year and through numerous programs including those for early career professionals, our Military Pathways Development Program, and our Office of Disability Inclusion. We empower our employees with opportunities and expanded experiences.

The business community must be ready to capitalize on the insatiable opportunities presented by AI. But it also must be ready to support local workforces so that they too can meet these challenges. At JPMorgan Chase, we’ve built out a local team of more than 2,000 AI/machine learning (ML) experts and data scientists to help us leverage the power of this technology. In every city we do business in, we seek to find ways to create sustainable economic impact and we see an incredible opportunity to leverage our expertise and experience in San Francisco, to help our public and private sector partners prepare the workforce alongside this incredible tech revolution.

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