🚨Here’s the 2025 Evident AI Index🚨

JPMorganChase, Capital One and RBC are again the top three on AI adoption. We rank banks on their performance on recruiting talent, innovating, speaking up about their work and their transparency. CommBank climbed a slot to fourth and Morgan Stanley jumped five places to round out the top five of our list of 50. 

Here are three takeaways from this year’s ranking:

1. WHAT BUBBLE? Seemingly every week, you hear about a huge AI deal, a new world-beating AI application and lots of hand-wringing about the existential threat to the economy (beware those Internet-circa-2000 bubbles!) and humanity itself. Sober-minded bankers aren’t known to hype tech or ignore threats of financial calamity, but their calls on AI speak for themselves. Top financial institutions are waving aside skepticism about the payoff from AI and continuing to invest hugely. This year’s top 10 increased their scores by more than double that of the average bank. Nearly all of the 70-plus metrics we use to put together the Index show growth compared to last year. And the return on investment is, if too slowly for some, coming through. Twice as many banks now report the total ROI across all their AI use cases compared to last year.

2. IT’S THE TALENT, STUPID: So much for AI killing all the jobs. The AI headcount at the 50 banks we track grew more than 25%, the largest increase since the Evident AI Index launched in early 2023. It’s not talent for talent’s sake: Our analysis shows that the more people a bank brings on, the more likely they are to roll out new use cases.

3. NORTH AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM: Seven of the top-10 banks, and 11 of the top 20, are headquartered in North America. Canadian and American banks, on average, grew their scores faster than banks in other parts of the world and have an average score more than 20% higher than the rest of the banks in the Index. The new world-ers invested early and continue to ramp up fast – that’s their secret sauce. Building on that head start, JPMC, Capital One and RBC upgraded their infrastructure and got more of the right people in the door. That lets them take big swings on “rewiring” the full business around the tech, as one JPMC executive put it last week.

READ MORE: The full 50-page Key Findings Report is available here.

What makes an AI-leading bank? The Evident AI Index looks at AI maturity across four pillars. Talent (45% of a bank’s score) measures how effectively a bank hires and retains the people building its AI tools. Innovation (30%) gauges how invested a bank is in the future, through research, patents and ventures. Leadership (15%) judges how clearly a bank can communicate about AI (and its returns). Transparency (10%) scores banks’ responsible AI practices. 

Each pillar represents a different way a bank can turn AI spend into returns; together, they illustrate how likely a bank is to truly transform itself with the tech.

🏆 #1 JPMorganChase completes the AI four-peat 🏆

Talent: #2 | Innovation: #1 | Leadership: #1 | Transparency #1 

JPMC tops the Index for the fourth time in a row, this time ranking first in three of the Index’s four pillars. In June, CEO Jamie Dimon said there would be “no job, no process, no function that won’t be affected by AI.” This year, its generative AI platform LLM Suite was rolled out to more than 200,000 people, 125,000 of whom use it every day. AI ROI was already “heading more towards $2 billion” when Daniel Pinto, the bank’s president and COO, updated his guidance at the end of last year. At its investor day this year, the Index’s largest bank went further, forecasting that AI could help the bank cut at least 10% from its headcount across a number of divisions.

Quick Stats: Of the 50 banks we track, JPMC employs the most AI talent, publishes the most research papers, devotes the most resources to responsible AI and has one of the deepest benches of executives talking about AI to investors.

🏆 #2 Capital One leans on talent 🏆

Talent: #1 | Innovation: #2 | Leadership: #20 | Transparency #17

With its acquisition of Discover closing this past May, Capital One added more AI talent than any bank in the Index. Critically the bank maintained its “density” – our measure of the ratio of AI talent to overall headcount. Though it can’t match JPMC on sheer numbers, about one of every fifteen Capital One employees now works on AI (to JPMC’s roughly one-in-forty), enough to vault the bank to the top ranking in the Talent pillar. Capital One doesn’t beat its chest about too many use cases. The tools it launched this year, however, showed that quiet doesn’t mean complacent. Its multi-agent car-buying tool Chat Concierge was one of the first (and only) customer-facing agentic use cases in the sector.

Quick stats: Capital One has filed more than 1,700 AI patents, the most of the 50 banks we track. The bank grew its AI team by 73% in the last year and doubled its AI research headcount – in no small part due to its big acquisition.

🏆 #3 RBC rides research and leadership to bronze 🏆

Talent: #12 | Innovation: #3 | Leadership: #3 | Transparency #3

RBC has become one of the Index’s poster children for connecting work in the lab to AI use cases and eventually real results. The Canadian leader jumped five spots in the Leadership pillar, in part due to new details it shared about applications like AI platform Lumina, foundation model ATOM, money management tool NOMI or capital markets trading platform Aiden. The bank’s focus on RAI research also led to a seven-spot gain in Transparency, which helped it defend its bronze.

Quick stats: The bank is one of only seven in the Index to set a target on the financial return of AI – up to $1 billion CAD ($723 million) by 2027 – and has reported the second-most use cases with outcomes, trailing only Société Générale.

📈 Goldman Sachs (#9) and Bank of America (#10) join top 10 📈 

Goldman Sachs jumps two places to regain its place in the top 10, a year after it dropped out. The resurgence started with CEO David Solomon’s outlining a “three-year program” to “run the firm more efficiently” in a letter to shareholders. In March, the bank poached Amazon’s Daniel Marcu to be its global head of AI engineering & science. In June, it rolled GS AI Assistant, the bank’s Gen AI productivity tool, firmwide. The bank's share of AI talent relative to overall headcount grew more than any other bank in the Index this year.

Bank of America had a more-pronounced jump, gaining five spots to round out the top 10. The rise follows a similar pattern as Goldman Sachs. The bank has new AI leadership, with Hari Gopalkrishnan now at the helm of its $13 billion tech budget. It pushed to expand AI adoption, noting that 90% of its 213,000 employees use AI assistant Erica. And it moved to the bleeding edge, doubling the number of research papers published in 2025 compared to 2024.

📈 LLOYDS, CHARLES SCHWAB AND BPCE MAKE BIG JUMPS 📈

Lloyds (#15) jumped up 12 spots, beating out NatWest (#16) and Barclays (#23) to be the second-best in the U.K. behind HSBC (#8). The bank rolled its first large-scale Gen AI product out this year and has the sixth-most AI use cases with outcomes of the 50 banks we track. Charles Schwab (#35) climbed out of the basement with a 14-place jump. It now says it has more than 90 AI use cases in development and employees use them 90% more than the previous year. Groupe BPCE (#25) climbed 15 spots to land in the top half of the ranking, though it still trails BNP Paribas (#11) and Société Générale (#24) in France. It launched its generative “AI for All” portal (MAiA) to 40,000 employees in April. 

See the full ranking of 50 banks and read our full analysis of the big trends in AI adoption here.  

This is our fourth Index, and feels almost like a graduation of sorts. So in that spirit, here are a few superlatives that might feature in a banking yearbook. Cue the Vitamin C:

MOST MAGNETIC: CommBank  

The Australian bank jumped up three spots in the Talent pillar and is growing its AI talent at twice the rate of the overall Index – faster than any bank other than Capital One. The 50 banks we track now employ more than 90,000 employees on AI, up from 70,000 a year ago. The talent arms race isn’t just a measure of a bank’s draw for technical talent; the eggheads are helping banks roll out more AI tools – and one day 🤞 reap widespread benefits. On average, the 10 banks with the highest AI headcount rolled out nearly double the use cases than the rest of the banks we track (See item above).

BEST EYES: UBS and Lloyds

These two European banks kept a watchful eye on AI deployments this year, surging into fourth and fifth in the Transparency pillar respectively. UBS and Lloyds were among those tied at the top of the RAI Leadership category, meaning they shared the most about the guardrails they’ve put in place to tame AI systems at the bank. Across the Index, the number of people working in the field more than doubled compared to last year, and they’re increasingly moving up the ranks.

MOST OUTGOING: JPMorganChase

The first bank to score perfect marks in the Leadership category, the Index’s top bank continued providing updates on the financial benefits of ROI in 2025. JPMC rose above a crowded field: 48 of the 50 banks put out press releases about AI, up from 43 last year. Thirty-six CEOs did an AI-focused interview, up from 31 a year ago.

MOST MUSICAL: Morgan Stanley

Morgan Stanley struck the right chord in 2025, climbing the scales into the top five overall and raising its ranking in the Talent, Leadership and Transparency pillars. The bank has had a steady drumbeat of Gen AI rollouts since last year, including DevGen.AI, a coding agent that rewrites and updates legacy code, which the firm says saved its developers 280,000 hours. 

MOST ENTREPRENEURIAL: Citi and BNP Paribas

Citi has made the most investments in AI companies of the 50 banks we track, overtaking Wells Fargo this year. And BNP Paribas did a particularly good job turning investments into use cases for the bank. In 2024, the French bank invested in the AI lab Mistral. It launched a Gen AI platform to all 50,000 investment banking employees, which gave them access to Mistral's models. Venture activity is still down across the board though: In 2025, the number of bank investments into AI companies declined by 17% compared with the previous year.

FUNNIEST IN CLASS: Deutsche Bank

The Deutsche Bank Research Institute amused us all year with its macro analysis. When DeepSeek came on the scene, the bank released 25 memes to understand the impact of the new Chinese model. And over the summer, they played off the streaming craze and released a report called “The Summer AI Turned Ugly.” The Index doesn’t award points for creativity – but it’s worth a tip of the hat from our team at The Brief.