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Artificial intelligence and equity compensation: What will 2025 bring?

Content Team January 29, 2025 mins read

About the team

J.P. Morgan Workplace Solutions’ Content Team comprises a dynamic and talented team of writers and experienced professionals who strive to deliver useful equity insights and simplify complex equity information, all with the aim of helping you to better understand equity management.

Artificial intelligence and equity compensation: What will 2025 bring?

Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to revolutionize many aspects of how all industries conduct business and 2025 looks to be a year when we will see major developments in how it could be transform employee equity compensation plan management.

To comment on where were we are now and what’s likely to come next with AI, Charese Smiley, Executive Director, Artificial Intelligence Research , and Travis Dingledine, Product Director, Workplace Solutions recently joined the Prosperity at Work podcast.

“We’re on the precipice of really incorporating AI in some of the ways that we present our business (J.P. Morgan Workplace Solutions) to our customers. It feels like we’re at a transformative inflection point, and it’s really exciting to be a part of that and to get to shepherd it,” Travis stated of this exciting moment.

When asked what kind of AI-related challenges he foresees he stressed that much of the heavy lifting in terms of creating internal tool kits and ensuring that language learning models (LLMs) can he used compliantly within the business has already been done. The next step is to build on that and increase day-to-day usage of AI within the company.

“We’ve done so much of the hard work already. The hardest part right now mainly relates to adoption. We’re at a point where we’re using AI every day, but it’s not quite a muscle yet. We’re just in this period of time where we need to get over a hump whereby this becomes a reflex. When we do that, individuals will be augmenting themselves in their day to day, versus where we are now, where some people aren’t sure how to use it just yet,” he said.

Travis also made a point of stating that the internal Workplace Solutions LLM is already proving to be of massive assistance in helping service teams to address participant inquiries, but, crucially, without detracting from the experience of reaching out.

“One of the things we’re really known for is the human touch of our service, but it’s hard to know every single nuance and detail for each client and then apply that to every individual on the phone. So, we’ve leaned into the bread and butter of LLMs, which is synthesis. That means our service agents are going to have that information at their fingertips. When an individual calls with a question, the agent is going to have information on that individual and the company they work for served up on a platter to them. That way, they can answer service requests quickly and very accurately. Keeping that human element in terms of service and customer is really important to us and it’s only going to get better from here,” he said.

Travis added that AI is set to play a key role in further developing the service Workplace Solutions offers to executives seeking to manage their equity compensation.

“Executives have a really difficult problem in terms of their ability to sell the equity they’re compensated with. They will have specific goals and needs in life and that often results in them having to create a 12-month sales plan looking into the future, that is often kind of transactional in nature. What’s really happening is that they’re selling their stock to address the goals they have in real life and with consideration to their family’s financial picture, whether that’s about long-term diversification or a short-term cash need. And so we’re using natural language processing to be able to input the client’s intent – combining the goal they’re trying to achieve with their balance sheet in real life with the transactional nature of their holdings. That ultimately allows us to create a trading schedule and to ensure that when we do transact the outcome will be fully aligned with what that individual is trying to achieve,” he said.

Whereas Travis is concerned first and foremost with the client and their experience, Charese’s focus is primarily on the AI itself, the potential risks involved with using LLMs and what Workplace Solutions or other companies, can do to best ensure their data remains secure.

Number one being that individuals need to be mindful when uploading information.

“When we interact with an LLM, we have to be aware that there’s a company on the other side who is receiving the data and sending us back responses. That means we need to be very careful when uploading proprietary company documents, because they are going out to a company and we become subject to how they maintain their data. If they get a data breach, our proprietary company data could potentially leak out,” she said.

Charese also highlighted how the training of LLMs could inadvertently lead to company information being accessed by competitors.

“If a company has our data and they use that to train another version, once the next model they build comes out competitors could ask questions and get answers on what our company is doing,” she said.

Charese stressed that she was not advising against using LLMs, but instead advocating for people stick to company guidelines when doing so.

“If you have (an LLM) in-house that you know is specifically built and tailored for your company and that your company allows you to use, then you can upload and interact with the data there, but also never taking it out of the company’s data system. Different roles will have different needs, for example HR professionals have to work with very sensitive data. The key thing is to make sure you understand what the guidelines are around the data are for your company and act accordingly,” she said.

To listen to the full podcast episode, visit here.

This publication contains general information only and J.P. Morgan Workplace Solutions is not, through this article, issuing any advice, be it legal, financial, tax-related, business-related, professional or other. J.P. Morgan Workplace Solutions’ Insights is not a substitute for professional advice and should not be used as such. J.P. Morgan Workplace Solutions does not assume any liability for reliance on the information provided herein.