JPMorgan Chase held on to the top spot for a fourth straight year in a global ranking of banks' AI capabilities. Capital One and Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) followed, keeping their positions among the leaders.

American Banker reported on Oct. 6 that research firm Evident AI assessed AI maturity at 50 major global banks and ranked JPMorgan Chase first. The evaluation analysed public data across four areas: AI talent and innovation, leadership and transparency. Capital One ranked second and RBC third.

JPMorgan Chase scored highly not only for innovation and the scale of its talent pool but also for building a system to spread AI across the company. Alexandra Mousavizadeh (알렉산드라 무사비자데), co-chief executive of Evident AI, said JPMorgan Chase is building infrastructure that can be used for AI across 22 business units and 10 functions. Capital One ranked first in both AI talent and innovation, while RBC showed strength in platform building and spreading AI across business units.

Top banks are focusing on building guardrails and control systems to operate agentic AI safely, going beyond simply introducing copilots. There is also a move to cut costs by using "dynamic model routing" that selects small language models or high-performance models depending on the task. Evident AI tallied a 21 percent rise this year in support staff developing AI control and management tools.

There were also changes in the rankings. Wells Fargo rose to fifth from sixth, Bank of America climbed to seventh from 10th, and Citi moved up to eighth from 12th. Morgan Stanley slipped to ninth from fifth.

Leading banks are using AI to improve revenue and speed up work rather than simply cut labour costs. Cutting the time needed for corporate customer onboarding and for investment banking research and product delivery is a representative example. The report also said it is realistic for smaller banks to focus AI on tasks where customers face real inconvenience, rather than compete with big banks on investment scale, and to strengthen existing human-centred personalised services.