Jamie Dimon released his 2025 annual letter to shareholders on April 6, 2026 — and while headlines focused on geopolitics (wars in Ukraine and Iran), trade wars, and his colorful opinion that Basel III capital requirements are “un-American,” there’s a thread running through the whole thing worth paying attention to. Dimon is arguably the most bullish public figure on AI you’ll find at the C-suite level of traditional finance. And unlike the usual tech-bro hand-wringing about AGI taking over, his take is refreshingly grounded: AI will make everything better, probably faster than we’d like, and Wall Street needs to stop pretending it’s optional.
“AI will affect virtually every function, application and process in the company. And in the long run, it will have a huge positive impact on productivity.”
That’s from Section I of the letter itself — buried between bank regulation complaints and Alabama investment plans. The man runs $185 billion in annual revenue and he’s basically saying: we’re putting AI everywhere because not doing so is stupid. He also wrote that JPMorgan “will not put our heads in the sand” on AI deployment, and flagged that it will eventually allow clients to predict cash flow needs and do their own budgeting for them.
The caveat? “The risk is if it’s too fast.” Dimon explicitly acknowledged that while AI will create huge long-term benefits, the transition could cause painful disruption. His solution: retraining at scale, moving workers where they’re needed, government and business working together instead of pretending the labor market fixes itself. In interviews around the letter’s release (CBS with Tony Dokoupil), he expanded on this — predicting AI will cure cancers, make cars and planes safer, and free up time for people to “hike more.” He also told Gen Z to learn to think, talk to everybody, develop emotional intelligence, and expect their lives to be more complex than ours were.
One of the most honest lines in the letter: “Overall, the investment in AI is not a speculative bubble; rather, it will deliver significant benefits. However, at this time, we cannot predict the ultimate winners and losers in AI-related industries.” This is Dimon being Dimon — optimistic about the technology, skeptical about timing, refusing to pretend he knows which companies will win. He also flagged that huge technological shifts always have second- and third-order effects on society that deserve monitoring.
For a project like lazyape — building collaborative, distributed ML systems for financial prediction — this is both validation and a reminder: the giants are moving fast. JPMorgan Chase has more data, more compute, and more engineering talent than most countries have people. If they’re deploying AI across every function right now, the competitive landscape is shifting faster than any single research project can track. The good news? Dimon also said AI will create more jobs than it destroys in the long run. The better news? There’s still room for distributed systems that let smaller players compete with the giants. That’s basically the entire thesis of what we’re building here.
Sources: Jamie Dimon’s 2025 Letter to Shareholders (JPMorgan Chase Annual Report, April 6, 2026), CBS interview with Tony Dokoupil, Business Insider coverage.