Teresa Heitsenrether spent four decades at JPMorgan Chase, starting as a summer intern and climbing to the top of the bank's AI efforts. Now she is stepping down just as Wall Street races to deploy artificial intelligence everywhere.
Her career spanned from the era of paper trade tickets to the age of chatbots that write memos.
Heitsenrether's long tenure tracked the bank's transformation from a traditional lender into a technology-driven financial powerhouse. She worked through the shift to electronic trading, the 2008 financial crisis, and the recent explosion of generative AI, all while rising through the ranks to sit on the bank's top operating committee.
Heitsenrether's tenure spanned transformative changes in banking. She later ran the securities services unit, which held roughly $30 trillion in assets under custody. When Russia invaded Ukraine, she coordinated the bank's response from a crisis center.
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For the past three years, Heitsenrether served as chief data and analytics officer, leading the bank's AI strategy and sitting on JPMorgan's 12-person operating committee. That committee is the bank's top decision-making group, alongside CEO Jamie Dimon.
Heitsenrether helped drive the development of that LLM suite. Additionally, JPMorgan partnered with Anthropic PBC as a charter member of "Project Glasswing," employing the Mythos model for internal tasks.
"Teresa has played a pivotal role in building and transforming some of our most important institutional businesses and, most recently, in shaping the firmwide data and artificial intelligence strategy that is central to our future," Jamie Dimon and Jenn Piepszak wrote in an internal memo announcing her retirement.
Scot Baldry, who is JPMorgan's chief technology officer, will assume the title and duties previously held by Heitsenrether. But he will not join the operating committee. Instead, he will report to CIO Lori Beer, who stays on the committee. That structure keeps AI oversight inside the bank's top leadership but shifts day-to-day management to a tech executive.
Heitsenrether's exit comes during a broader leadership shake-up. The bank recently named Doug Petno and Troy Rohrbaugh as co-presidents, putting them in line to possibly succeed Jamie Dimon one day.
JPMorgan will continue building its AI tools without Heitsenrether at the helm. Scot Baldry now oversees both technology and data strategy, and the operating committee still includes chief information officer Lori Beer.
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