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JPMorgan software developers have new objectives: use AI or fall behind

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JPMorgan Chase’s message to its global armada of software developers is clear: embrace AI or risk falling behind.

Internal company documents seen by Business Insider and posted to JPMorgan’s intranet for employees lay out a series of new expectations for the bank’s software engineering workforce, who comprise the majority of its 65,000-person-strong Global Technology division. The newly listed objectives, published on the intranet earlier this month, say all software and security engineers are expected to “drive excellence” by adopting AI and “contributing to initiatives that improve productivity, speed, scalability, and impact.”

One document authored by the bank’s human resources leaders laid out two core objectives for software engineers: step up their coding game, and start harnessing AI to save time and get more done. The new language about objectives “will be added automatically and will appear by the end of March,” an image of the document on the intranet showed — a reference to upcoming changes to employees’ goals expected to take effect at the end of this month. The firm also instructed workers to develop clear goals with their managers that align with the bank’s new objectives.

“Demonstrate measurable improvement in code quality, speed and productivity through regular use of approved AI coding assist tools, contributing to the team’s overall efficiency targets,” read one goal written by HR. “Engage in identifying, implementing and optimizing AI-driven automation opportunities within technology lifecycle management (TLM) processes to drive efficiency and support capacity unlock initiatives, ensuring all enhancements leverage current technology assets before considering new solutions.”

A spokeswoman for JPMorgan declined to comment.

JPMorgan is among Wall Street’s biggest spenders on technology and artificial intelligence, with projected tech investments reaching roughly $20 billion in 2026 — far exceeding peers like Goldman Sachs. Across corporate America, companies including Meta and Google have begun pushing employees to adopt AI tools and, in some cases, evaluating their use.

Business Insider spoke to five engineers across the bank who said the push to adopt AI has been felt far and wide — in managerial conversations, in intranet posts, and through dashboards that display who’s using certain AI tools, and who’s not. They added that discussions about productivity and AI adoption have become more frequent in recent weeks. It all comes as developers get ready for a pilot of Anthropic’s Claude Code to be rolled out as soon as April, said a longtime IT developer in the Global Technology group. Claude Code would be made available alongside the four other large language models coders are already using: two from OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and two from Anthropic’s Claude.

‘Anxiety’ among developers

The developers Business Insider spoke to said they’ve been encouraged to use AI tools for a wide range of tasks, from writing code to preparing presentations. One dashboard that tracked adoption and usage of the bank’s GitHub Copilot appeared to show details as granular as which employees had installed it and identified individuals as “light,” “heavy,” or “non” users.

For some, the message has added pressure inside a firm that has drawn scrutiny in recent years for its use of internal monitoring tools and performance tracking. Business Insider published a series of reports on the firm’s Workforce Activity Data Utility in 2022, a program that collected data points about how employees were spending their day — from the length of video calls to how long they spent drafting emails to where they were sitting in the office.

“There’s a lot of anxiety in the environment right now,” the longtime IT developer said. Those who don’t use AI risk being seen as underperforming, the developer said. Another developer said their manager said in a recent meeting that availability of the new AI tools comes with an “expectation” that velocity and output should show “a noticeable increase” quarter over quarter.

Three of the five developers Business Insider spoke to said the tools are helpful, despite discomfort over the tracking.

New performance dimensions

The updated guidance on AI use comes as the bank implements other adjustments to how it ranks workers’ success on the job. Going forward, the bank said on the intranet portal, it’s streamlining some of the primary “dimensions” it uses to grade employees, pivoting to using two categories: “what you achieve” — business outcomes — and “how you achieve it,” including adherence to the firm’s behavioral principles.

According to screenshots from the bank’s intranet, JPMorgan will segment workers into three buckets: “stand out” for those who exceed job standards, “achiever” for the majority of employees, and “needs improvement” for those who require “additional support” and have struggled to perform consistently.

Another page Business Insider reviewed listed skills non-managers working in software engineering were expected to display across “all performance dimensions.” One is “Data Fluency,” noting that the skill is applied by those who develop and drive “adoption of new tools or methodologies to leverage data in the flow of work.” “Rate of adoption” is cited as one measurement of the employee’s impact toward exhibiting the skill in practice.

The documents from the JPMorgan intranet echo the firm’s long-standing culture of internal monitoring and data collection, making clear that continuous performance tracking is vital for keeping workers on target throughout the year.

“You and your manager will use your objectives to track your progress during the year, recognize impact, and streamline your annual review,” the firm wrote on an internal page tied to goals.

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Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke let AI read his MRI, and build the software to do it

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Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke recently shared how he used AI to create software for an incredibly niche, but important, situation.

His annual MRI scan comes on a USB stick, but requires commercial Windows software to open. Instead of going in search of this existing software, he ran Anthropic’s Claude AI model directly on the MRI files and prompted it to build a web-based viewer.

The result, he said, looked “way better.” With one more prompt, the tool even annotated the images with the findings from the scan.

Lütke called this an example of “reflexively” reaching for AI — training yourself to instinctively use it to build bespoke tools when off-the-shelf software falls short.

“You want to train your brain on this intuition,” he wrote in a thread on X that got more than 7.5 million views.

This type of experimentation takes more upfront time, and it requires challenging your assumptions about how things should be done, according to Bernard Golden, CEO of Navica, a Silicon Valley-based technology analysis, consulting, and investment firm.

“You have to spend some brainpower to reflect on established habits to see how AI could be inserted, but doing so has a snowball effect: the more you try, the more you do,” Golden told Business Insider. “It’s like learning a language. It’s uncomfortable to try speaking when you’re starting out, but doing so accelerates your skills and confidence.”

Sign up for BI’s Tech Memo newsletter here. Reach out to me via email at abarr@businessinsider.com.




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Alistair Barr, global tech editor of Business Insider, smiles at the camera while wearing a blue and white striped shirt.

A software CEO called me on the weekend recently with painful predictions. One is already coming true.

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On a recent weekend, I was playing with my new puppy when my phone rang. On the other end was the CEO of a major public software company with a warning: the industry was headed for painful financial reset.

I can’t say who this is because he doesn’t want to be identified, talking about sensitive topics — and he wanted to speak honestly, without the usual restrictions of his company’s public relations department. These are the times you really listen!

The topic was broadly about how AI is disrupting software and impacting the business models of companies that offer software as a service, or SaaS. I’ve covered this deeply for about a year, so this wasn’t a surprise. But one of his main messages was unexpected — and is already proving prescient.

This CEO said stock-based compensation, or SBC, is too high for SaaS companies now. Future revenue growth may not be as strong anymore, so SBC has to come down, and the financial discipline of the software industry has to improve. This year, SaaS companies will have to cut a lot of employees to adjust, he predicted.

I’ll explain this more in a second, but this reality is already beginning to play out. On Wednesday, a prominent software provider called Atlassian said it’s cutting 10% of its workforce. That followed Block’s 40% job cuts.

Both companies attributed some of these layoffs to the impact of generative AI. However, they both said they’re still hiring engineers.

“Five years from now, we’ll have more engineers working for our company than we do today,” Atlassian CEO Mike Cannon-Brooks said in October, adding, “They will be more efficient.”

So what’s really happening here? Let’s go back to the weekend call I got from that other software CEO.

The rise of cheaper software

One broad message he shared is that generative AI is making it much easier to create software. This means the supply of software is skyrocketing, so according to the law of supply and demand, the value of software is falling.

This won’t mean the death of SaaS. In fact, cheaper and more prevalent software will be a huge boon to the tech industry because more people will use it. And smart software engineers will be needed to check that all this software is still working — and to understand deeply why it’s working or not.

“Engineering is changing, and great engineers are more important than ever,” said Boris Cherny, the head of Anthropic’s Claude Code, one of the main drivers of AI software disruption.

So, what’s likely happening is that generative AI is changing how software is made and maintained, and upending how software companies charge for their offerings.

For now, this could mean slower revenue growth for software providers. And this is what brings us back to the need for more financial discipline in the sector — and to the issue of stock-based compensation, or SBC.

Engineers and other tech talent are wooed by software companies with generous chunks of equity, known as restricted stock units, or RSUs. The awards are often valued based on the market price on the day they’re granted.

That works well when stocks are rising. But software stocks have taken a beating in recent months on concern about slowing growth and the potential impact of AI.

To keep the same level of stock compensation with the same size workforce, software companies will soon have to issue millions of extra shares. That will dilute existing shareholders and cut deeply into future earnings per share, one of the main measures of any company’s financial health.

“SBC (stock-based compensation) is coming up a lot more in our investor conversations,” Raimo Lenshow, a software analyst at Barclays, wrote in a recent research note.

He assessed software company valuations after the recent SaaS swoon in the market. Stocks looked more compelling, until he included SBC in the analysis.

“Adjusting for the large levels of stock-based compensation, the situation looks less rosy,” he warned.

So what can software companies do to address investor concerns about this? One solution is to cut jobs. That immediately reduces stock-based compensation costs, because companies don’t need to issue more new stock to those folks being let go (and future vesting ends for these people, too). This improves earnings, based on old-school GAAP measures — which is where investors like to go during times of stress in the tech industry.

This was a big driver of Atlassian’s job cuts this week, according to William Blair analysts.

“For Atlassian, it is important to moderate SBC lower as it has one of the highest levels of stock comp in the industry,” they wrote in a research note. “This has recently become a louder conversation as tech investors look for more profits from scaled businesses.”

This happened in 2022 as well, and Business Insider covered it a lot. Back then, the tech industry was coming down hard from a pandemic-era hiring binge. Growth was slowing and SBC looked completely unsustainable. Brutal financial discipline ensued and thousands of tech workers lost their jobs.

We’re in a similar moment now, according to that CEO who called me on the weekend. Before he got off the phone, he said financial discipline has to improve.

Sign up for BI’s Tech Memo newsletter here. Reach out to me via email at abarr@businessinsider.com.




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Oracle’s Larry Ellison downplays software apocalypse fears: ‘We think the SaaSpocalypse applies to others, but not to us’

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Oracle executives downplayed fears that AI will spell the death of software-as-a-service companies.

Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison said during the company’s earnings call on Tuesday that he believes the so-called Saaspocalypse will be a problem for other companies, but not his.

“We have these coding tools now that allow us to build a comprehensive set of software, agent-based software, to implement to automate a complete ecosystem like healthcare or financial services,” Ellison said. “That’s what we’re doing at Oracle. That’s why we think we’re a disruptor. That’s why we think the Saaspocalypse applies to others but not to us.”

Fears that AI will replace traditional software tools have been particularly high over the past month, after Anthropic released new agentic AI tools, triggering a sell-off in software stocks, including Salesforce and Asana.

Oracle CEO Mike Sicilia also said on the earnings call that he doesn’t agree with the idea of the Saaspocalypse.

“I do think that AI tools and their coding capabilities would be a threat if we weren’t adopting them, but we are, and very rapidly,” he said. “We are building brand new SaaS products using AI and also embedding AI agents right into our existing applications suites.”

Sicilia added, “I’ve not yet met a customer who tells me they’re ready to give away their retail merchandising system, their core banking system, demand deposit account systems, electronic health record systems, and some cobbling together of niche AI features are going to replace all of that overnight. In fact, we hear quite the
opposite from the customers.”

Oracle isn’t the only company trying to downplay the fears of AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI becoming a threat to software giants.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff recently tried to reassure investors that the company’s focus on AI agents would insulate it from the software apocalypse. “If there is a ‘SaaSpocalypse’, it may be eaten by the ‘SaaS-quatch’ because there are a lot of companies using a lot of SaaS because it just got better with agents,” he said.

Workday CEO Aneel Bhusri also tried to allay fears during the company’s earnings call last week that HR and business software systems require complex security and regulatory needs, and boasted that AI companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI are running its software.

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Chong Ming Lee, Junior News Reporter at Business Insider's Singapore bureau.

The CEO of a $15 billion AI company says the biggest AI winners won’t be software — they’ll be mines, farms, and trucks

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AI’s biggest impact will likely happen far from laptops, says the CEO of a $15 billion AI company.

Qasar Younis, the cofounder and CEO of Applied Intuition, said on an episode of “Lenny’s Podcast” published Sunday that “the real impact of AI in the next 5 to 10 years” would show up in physical industries, like “in farming, in mining, in construction, in self-driving trucks.”

Applied Intuition develops software to test and power autonomous vehicles and other machines. The company said in June that it raised $600 million in a funding round, valuing it at $15 billion.

Software tools like Moltbook and OpenClaw may excite developers, but Younis said they touch only a small slice of society.

“I love the stuff that’s happening on these platforms, but it’s still segregated to, like, frankly, developers,” he added.

Instead, he said the biggest shift will come from adding intelligence to machines already embedded in the physical economy.

“More pragmatically, it’s actually just putting intelligence into things that already exist all around us.”

Industries like trucking and farming urgently need that kind of autonomy, he said.

“People are not fighting for those trucking jobs,” Younis said. The average farmer is already in their late 50s, meaning many will retire in the coming decade, potentially worsening labor shortages.

AI is more likely to help fill labor shortages in these industries than replace them entirely, he added.

The company has tested autonomous trucks in Japan, where an aging workforce means a driver shortage, and it’s working on AI in mining safety and efficiency.

AI’s impact on blue-collar industries

Earlier this year, Wall Street grew worried that new AI tools and agents could replace some software products entirely.

A research paper by Citrini, an investment firm focused on thematic equity investing, triggered a global stock sell-off last month after researchers outlined a scenario in which the AI boom wipes out white-collar jobs and ultimately slows economic growth.

Against that backdrop, some industry leaders say physical industries could end up benefiting from the technology.

For instance, robots could help address labor shortages in manufacturing. Daniel Diez, the chief business officer of Agility Robotics, told Business Insider in a report published on Sunday that manufacturers globally “simply can’t find the people to do this work.”

Ford CEO Jim Farley said last year that AI-powered augmented-reality tools are helping technicians repair trucks more efficiently, though he warned that automation could still reshape jobs across the broader economy.

Business Insider reported last year that some Gen Z workers are increasingly considering trade and blue-collar careers as automation and AI create uncertainty around traditional white-collar professions.




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Chong Ming Lee, Junior News Reporter at Business Insider's Singapore bureau.

I’m a senior software engineer laid off from Block. There are 3 things I’m keeping in mind as I reenter the job market.

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This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Isaac Casanova, who has worked at Block for nearly three years as a senior software engineer. It has been edited for length and clarity.

I wasn’t even looking at my computer at the time. One of my good friends started spam calling me. I picked up the phone, and he told me to check my email.

I read the email from Jack Dorsey, and I was like, whoa, I guess I don’t have a role anymore.

We were well aware that rolling layoffs were underway. Most people assumed it would be capped at 1,000. I didn’t feel like anything big like that was coming. For it all to happen at once like that is obviously a shock.

I never got a low rating. In my conversations with folks, I was doing fine. That’s why it’s characterized as a layoff, not a performance thing. This is just a change in business direction.

Check your ego — the industry is tough

I’m managing my expectations as I look for work.

It seems like companies are tighter with headcount and more picky about who they want.

There are definitely fewer positions. Companies are doing more with less. These agents are automating some tasks and are slowly improving at understanding concepts.

The compensation is definitely lower. We’re hearing across the industry that stock grants are lower than they used to be. Refresher grants are lower. Bonuses — if they exist.

Once you get in, it’s stack-ranked performance management. Your output is compared to your peers from day one. It’s definitely tougher.

You’ve got to check your ego. That might be the part people struggle with more than their technical ability.

Separate your identity from your job

At the end of the day, companies are beholden to shareholders.

Jack’s memo came across as what someone in that position making a tough decision would say. A call was made, and it had to be communicated. I don’t have any negative feelings about anybody that I worked with or at the company.

The biggest expense of running an organization is employees. The higher you are — senior engineer, engineering manager, head of product — the more expensive you are.

You need to remember that and evaluate your relationship with work. Many people in these positions tie their identity to their jobs. Those are the people most affected when these things happen.

You try not to take it personally. You see it as a new opportunity. There’s a human aspect — you just lost your job, and it kind of sucks for a bit — but you can’t let it hold you down. You can’t let it define you. These things happen, and you need to adjust.

The good thing about when these things happen is the network of people that you’ve met. Build the network so that when things like this happen, you can maneuver.

Be flexible — AI is changing the role

You could tell on the inside that things were changing.

A couple of years ago, I was doing most of the coding by hand. That slowly turned into using interfaces like Cursor, Claude Code, Goose, and ChatGPT. You’d slowly read things internally like, “Let’s speed up.” You were expected to speed up because the agents could make you more productive.

You’d have conversations with some of your colleagues and be like, “I haven’t opened my IDE in a month.” As a software engineer, that’s definitely a shift.

AI turns you from a person who just turns out code into more of an experimenter — a builder.

Software engineering, for a long time, was so by the letter, by the design, by the spec. Exact and precise, but slow.

Now we have these tools, the industry expects you to move fast. You can shift your mindset from that rigid engineering, step-by-step, to more of an exploratory “attack the problem, solve it, refine it later.”

Don’t get too trapped in the domain that you’re working in. Block tended to hire specialists who could also generalize when needed. So, be flexible. Using these tools allows you to get context in areas that you might not have had the opportunity to work in.

Do you have a story to share about tech layoffs? Contact this reporter at cmlee@businessinsider.com or on Signal at cmlee.81.




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Microsoft is considering a new AI-loaded software bundle for Microsoft 365, sources say

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  • Microsoft is considering releasing a new AI revamp of its software bundle, sources say.
  • The bundle could include Microsoft Copilot and its new AI agent hub, Agent 365.
  • The company could charge up to $99 per user.

After years of internal buzz and false starts, Microsoft is considering rolling out its long-rumored E7 enterprise productivity software bundle, a pricier, AI-loaded version of Microsoft 365, according to two people familiar with the plans.

Microsoft 365 is a popular suite of productivity software that includes widely used tools such as Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Microsoft sells this software primarily in bundles called E3 and E5, where the E stands for “enterprise.” E3 is a more basic offering, while E5 has more bells and whistles.

A larger, more expensive “E7” software bundle has long been rumored and has earned a kind of mythical status inside Microsoft, with employees and salespeople debating and guessing whether it will ever appear.

Microsoft’s AI-packed E7 bundle comes as competitors like Google, Salesforce, and nearly every major software-as-a-service company rush to embed AI tools and autonomous agents into their products. Software stocks have taken a significant hit this year as investors worry that generative AI tools will upend traditional software products.

Microsoft declined to comment.

The new E7 bundle under consideration includes everything in the E5 bundle, plus AI features such as Microsoft Copilot and the company’s new AI agent hub, Agent 365, the people said.

Microsoft is looking into per-seat and consumption-based pricing for E7, but could charge up to $99 per user per month, the people said. E5’s current advertised price is $57 per user per month while Copilot is advertised as an add-on for $21 per user per month.

The company previously floated a new AI software bundle in 2024, but paused the plan.

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After weeks of getting bashed, two software giants can make the case for why AI won’t kill them

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After being marked for dead, software companies have a chance to tell their side of the story.

Excluding Canada’s Olympic hockey teams, no one has had a tougher go recently than software companies. Everyone faces some fear over AI, but software’s diagnosis has been more dire than most. (Author Nassim Taleb was the latest to write software’s eulogy, although he’s not known for his optimism.)

Two software giants — Salesforce and Snowflake — get to make the case for why they’re still very much alive. Both companies report earnings after the bell and will be interested in changing a narrative that’s helped push their stocks down 27% (Salesforce) and 26% (Snowflake) this year.

(Workday, another software company that’s been getting hammered, made the case yesterday why AI is friend, not foe.)

A major problem for software companies is that their opponent is largely hypothetical. Even if both companies report blockbuster earnings, there’s still the counterargument that AI will eventually eat their lunch.

Anthropic has played this game masterfully. The startup has strategically rolled out product announcements for its AI chatbot, Claude. The news has devastated entire industries despite there being no evidence of widespread adoption yet.

Here’s what to look out for from Salesforce and Snowflake when they report:

Salesforce: Marc Benioff’s company is the prototypical enterprise software company. Customer relationship management systems are all about workflow and rely heavily on seat-based subscriptions. That makes Salesforce a prime target for AI automation and a bellwether for other software companies.

Benioff has sought to address competitors head-on with Salesforce’s own AI agents and even contemplated a name change to acknowledge the shift. But Agentforce has had its share of challenges. An internal survey showed that most employees feel AI is increasing their productivity, but Salesforce will want the same positivity coming from outside its walls.

These days, AI might not even be Salesforce’s biggest headache. An off-color joke from Benioff at a recent employee event has outraged many workers and even prompted fellow Salesforce executives to speak out.

Snowflake: The data-warehousing giant might seem like a major beneficiary of AI. Models need tons of data to function. Snowflake helps companies organize and analyze massive amounts of data. Everybody wins!

The potential future isn’t as rosy. Snowflake’s business might not face the direct risk that other software companies struggle with, but it could slide down the totem pole of customers’ tool set. Instead of being considered a crucial software, it could become just another piece of back-end infrastructure.

Snowflake’s own CEO warned of this future, saying models’ desire to have easy access to all types of data means “everything else, the world, is just a dumb data pipe that feeds into that big brain.”

And unfortunately for Snowflake, the value you provide to customers as a “dumb data pipe” is a lot lower, meaning you can’t charge as much.




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