By Nupur Anand

NEW YORK (Reuters) -JPMorgan Chase's artificial-intelligence tools enabled it to boost sales to wealthy clients and manage scores of requests from worried customers even during April's market rout, the bank's CEO of asset and wealth management said.

The largest U.S. lender has been ramping up its use of AI, along with its peers. Goldman Sachs is rolling out a generative AI assistant to its bankers, traders and asset managers, while Morgan Stanley developed a chatbot for its financial advisers with OpenAI.

JPMorgan's AI tools supercharged the speed at which its bankers could provide research and investment advice to wealthy clients last month at a time when the U.S. tariff announcements erased trillions of dollars from the stock market.

"In the last few weeks, there have been several fluctuations in the market which are not in normal bite sizes, making it very complicated to think about all your clients and all the things required to do," Mary Erdoes, JPMorgan's CEO of asset and wealth management, told Reuters. The powerful AI tools helped advisers to quickly handle client requests by pulling data on their trading patterns and anticipating queries, she said. 

In the days surrounding U.S. President Donald Trump's tariff announcement last month, U.S. stock markets set a record for single-day trading volume, and posted some of the sharpest intraday swings of the past 50 years.

The volatility prompted individual investors to call their bankers seeking advice, Erdoes said.

"When you have a tool that pre-populates all the data and the movement in real time, while also remembering clients' old investment preferences and helps in tailoring a plan for them quickly, it also allows advisers to do much more," she added.

JPMorgan's so-called Coach AI tool used by private client advisers is quicker at locating content and research to drive conversations with clients. 

"Our advisers are finding the right information up to 95% faster - which means they spend less time searching and more time engaging in meaningful conversations with clients," said Mike Urciuoli, chief information officer at JPMorgan asset and wealth management.

ADDING CLIENTS

The app will help advisers expand their client rosters by 50% in the next three-to-five years by enabling them to take on more clients, with AI handling some of the other research-related work.

JPMorgan Asset & Wealth Management also said gross sales between 2023 and 2024 increased by 20%, with GenAI-driven tools helping teams focus more effectively on high-impact client work.

"AI has also been handling a lot of anticipatory work, allowing advisers to be prepared for what could have otherwise been a very stressful moment with market movements," Erdoes said.

JPMorgan had a technology budget of $17 billion last year. The bank already has about 450 potential cases for which it could use AI, and CEO Jamie Dimon expects those potential applications to surge to 1,000 by next year, he said earlier this year.

Portfolio managers in asset management are also using the AI tools, Erdoes said.

The bank's GenAI toolkit is now deployed on the desktops of more than 200,000 employees, more than half of whom use it several times a day, the bank said. The bank employs almost 320,000 people.

"We are trying to democratize AI and put it in the hands of more employees instead of a select group," Erdoes added.

Harvard Business School recently published a case study on the potential of generative AI which included the tools being used by the 4,000 advisers serving JPMorgan's high-net-worth private bank clients to study its impact on the bank's business.

The initiatives have already saved the bank nearly $1.5 billion through fraud prevention, personalization, trading, operational efficiencies and credit decisions, JPMorgan said.

Mike Mayo, an analyst at Wells Fargo, expects the financial benefits from AI to go up by another billion dollars for the bank.

"JPMorgan is a goliath and the goliath has been winning on AI. It is able to spend more money, have a cohesive strategy and incorporate the benefits to gain more share," said Mayo.

(Reporting by Nupur Anand in New York, Editing by Lananh Nguyen and Matthew Lewis)