JPMorgan Chase topped the Evident AI Index for Banks for the fifth consecutive year, extending its lead over rivals as the industry's pace of AI deployment hit a record high, according to Bloomberg .
Capital One Financial and Royal Bank of Canada held on to their positions in second and third place on the index, which came out Tuesday. Commonwealth Bank of Australia came in fourth, making it the only Asia-Pacific lender in the top 10; UBS Group, meanwhile, was the lone European bank to crack the top six, Bloomberg reported. DBS Group Holdings, Southeast Asia's largest bank, ranked 25th.
AI capabilities among the 50 assessed banks advanced at close to triple the rate seen over the preceding three-year period — the sharpest acceleration since the index launched in 2023, Evident said. The firm warned that lenders unable to demonstrate measurable returns from AI risk seeing their programs stall.
"Roles are changing, and some are not being backfilled, but the banks at the top of our Index are growing, and growing headcount," Evident co-founder and co-chief executive officer Alexandra Mousavizadeh said in a statement. "This could be the start of the largest net job creation we have seen in decades."
Evident evaluates each bank on four dimensions: the depth of its AI talent pool, research output and patents, how executives communicate about AI, and how openly institutions disclose their deployment practices, the company said. Now in its fifth edition, it covers 50 of the world's largest banks across North America, Europe, and selected Asia-Pacific markets.
Wells Fargo rose one position to fifth place. According to Bloomberg, Evident pointed to Wells Fargo as a case study, describing how the bank fed AI agents a decade and a half of loan decisions to handle parts of underwriting, while human underwriters retain the final say. JPMorgan, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, and Royal Bank of Canada led all banks in AI hiring, Bloomberg reported.
JPMorgan carries a technology budget of nearly $20 billion annually. The bank has been expanding its AI deployment broadly , with plans to roll out agents capable of operating without human intervention for hours at a time later this year. Separately, the bank's chief data and analytics officer, Teresa Heitsenrether, who oversaw the buildout of JPMorgan's large language model suite during her three-year tenure , is retiring at the end of this year after nearly four decades at the firm.
