JPMorgan Chase plans to deploy AI agents capable of operating without human intervention for hours at a time later this year, according to CNBC.
Derek Waldron, JPMorgan’s chief analytics officer, described a broader shift underway in the technology, with AI agents no longer confined to discrete, single-step tasks but now capable of coordinating complex workflows spanning multiple software environments. “We’ve entered now the era of long-running autonomous agents,” Waldron said. “That means that agents don’t just run for two or three minutes to carry out a goal or some instructions of a human, they can run for an hour or two.” That CNBC report suggests the rollout indicates the technology has largely addressed the security and governance obstacles that large organizations have historically cited as barriers to adoption. “We will have those in 2026,” Waldron said
Progress on that front has been driven in part by gains in AI reasoning, and Waldron gave this capacity a name — “intellectual coherence” — to describe whether a model can sustain productive, independent operation over an extended period. Those reasoning improvements have pushed AI systems away from the role of solo executor and toward something closer to a supervisory function, he said. “Just like how people function, team managers can parse out a problem and delegate activities, and teams can run for a lot longer to do more complex things,” Waldron said. Waldron also pointed to capabilities such as code generation, browser navigation, and direct interaction with desktop applications as developments that have meaningfully broadened the scope of tasks agents can handle.
Waldron said that over time, agents will be capable of running coherently for “multiple hours, then days, then weeks.” JPMorgan, the largest U.S. bank by assets, carries a technology budget of nearly $20 billion annually. In private banking, the bank has put AI to work analyzing overnight market data, client holdings, and research so that…