JP Morgan’s AI adoption hit 50% of employees. The secret? A connectivity-first architecture

When Derek Waldron and his technical team at JPMorgan Chase first launched an LLM suite with personal assistants two-and-a-half years ago, they weren’t sure what to expect. That wasn’t long after the game-changing emergence of ChatGPT, but in enterprise, skepticism was still high. Surprisingly, employees opted into the internal platform organically — and quickly. Within months, usage jumped from zero to 250,000 employees. Now, more than 60% of employees across sales, finance, technology, operations, and other departments use the continually evolving, continually connected suite.“We were surprised by just how viral it was,” Waldron, JPMorgan’s chief analytics officer, explains in a new VB Beyond the Pilot podcast. Employees weren’t just designing prompts, they were building and customizing