JPMorgan Chase is adding AI usage to the performance goals of roughly 65,000 engineers — but the infrastructure to monitor those engineers was already in place. The bank has run Workforce Activity Data Utility (WADU), a system that tracked Zoom calls, desk reservations, and badge swipes across hundreds of thousands of employees, since 2022. What changed this month is only what WADU is pointing at next.
The newly listed objectives, published on the bank's intranet earlier this month, say all software and security engineers are expected to "drive excellence by adopting AI" and to "demonstrate measurable improvement in code quality, speed and productivity through regular use of approved AI coding assist tools," Business Insider reported. The language will be added automatically to employee goals and will appear by the end of March.
One tool already doing the classification is the bank's GitHub Copilot dashboard. It identifies individual engineers as light, heavy, or non-users — a granularity that makes the anxiety on the record feel earned. "There's a lot of anxiety in the environment right now," one longtime JPMorgan IT developer told Business Insider. Another said their manager stated in a recent meeting that the availability of new AI tools comes with an expectation that velocity and output should show a noticeable increase quarter over quarter.
The WADU precedent matters because it shows how seriously JPMorgan takes workforce surveillance as a management instrument. As Business Insider documented in 2022, the system pulled in data from the moment employees logged into their workplace portal each day — tracking how long they spent on Zoom calls, writing emails, talking on the phone, and even badging in and out of the building. The AI tracking is not a new experiment in monitoring. It is an extension of an existing one.
JPMorgan has also been preparing to widen its AI toolset. Developers are getting ready for a pilot of Anthropic's Claude Code to be rolled out as soon as April, alongside the four models coders already use: two from OpenAI's ChatGPT and two from Anthropic's Claude, according to Business Insider. The expansion reflects a broader pattern inside the bank. JPMorgan's technology budget is roughly $19.8 billion in 2026, with about $1.2 billion earmarked for AI investments — the largest tech budget in the industry, per CFO Jeremy Barnum at the bank's 2026 company update on February 24, 2026 Business Insider. JPMorgan has developed 450+ AI use cases in production, per Tearsheet — a figure independently confirmed by AI News in December 2025. Prism News separately reported the bank doubled its AI use cases in production in 2025 Prism News. Its internal LLM platform, LLM Suite, has been deployed to over 200,000 employees, with approximately 150,000 using AI tools weekly and about half using them daily Larridin data.
The returns on that investment remain an open question. Dimon told Bloomberg TV in October 2025 that the bank spends about $2 billion a year on AI, and that the payoff so far is roughly equivalent to the cost: "We have shown that for $2 billion of expense, we have about $2 billion of benefit," he said Business Insider. That is break-even, not net savings — and Dimon himself acknowledged that time savings from tools like LLM Suite are not currently captured in the bank's NPV calculations for AI projects.
CEO Jamie Dimon has acknowledged publicly that the bank has displaced workers due to AI — and said it offers them other jobs. "We can take people who are displaced — and we have displaced people from AI — and we offer them other jobs," he said at the February investor meeting HR Executive. CFO Jeremy Barnum described the bank as growing client-facing roles and modestly expanding some technology functions while shrinking in operations and support. The tension between those two facts — displacement acknowledged, surveillance expanded — is the part the internal documents don't resolve.
The anxiety is not unique to JPMorgan. A Checkr survey found 58 percent of managers said AI use is becoming an unspoken performance requirement, while only 29 percent of employees agreed HR Executive. At Meta, head of people Janelle Gale told employees that AI-driven impact would become a core expectation starting in 2026 Times of India. Google managers are telling some employees their AI use will be factored into performance reviews, Business Insider separately reported. Deloitte found 53 percent of companies are adjusting talent strategies through education to raise AI fluency, while only 33 percent are redesigning career paths to accommodate the shift — which suggests most companies are asking workers to adapt without giving them a clear map of where the ground is going to be.
What is specific to JPMorgan is not the idea of tracking AI usage — it is the infrastructure already in place to do it, and the speed with which the goal-setting system is being stood up. WADU was not a response to any particular crisis. It was a philosophy: know what your workforce is doing. The AI tracking is that philosophy applied to a different instrument. Whether the 65,000 engineers on the receiving end of it see it as a productivity tool or a new way to be measured against an algorithm — the documents suggest the bank has already decided the answer doesn't change the policy.
