JPMorgan Chase & Co. named Guy Halamish chief operating officer of its commercial and investment bank to help speed up the rollout of artificial-intelligence tools across that business.

Halamish, who has been at the biggest US bank for more than two decades, will work directly with the heads of markets, global banking, payments and securities services to “maximize the impact of AI,” according to an internal memo this week. He’ll appoint chief data and analytics officers for each of those businesses as part of the effort.

The new team will “play a critical role in shaping our data and analytics strategy, ensuring data quality and governance, developing our platforms, and unlocking value from our firmwide data assets,” Doug Petno and Troy Rohrbaugh, co-heads of the commercial and investment bank, wrote in the memo.

Firms across the financial industry have sought to develop and deploy AI use cases and harness their own data to gain an edge over competitors. JPMorgan Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon has likened the potential of AI to the invention of the steam engine, and he said in October that his firm’s annual savings from AI now match its annual spend on the technology.

Petno and Rohrbaugh wrote in a letter to shareholders last year that the commercial and investment bank had more than 175 AI use cases in production, and was already using it to improve efforts including fraud protection, sanctions screening, capital efficiency in the trading business and economic data analysis.

Dimon tapped longtime executive Teresa Heitsenrether almost three years ago to oversee JPMorgan’s AI push across the firm as chief data and analytics officer. Halamish and his team will work closely with Heitsenrether’s unit, according to the memo.

— by Hannah Levitt (Bloomberg News)