In October 2025, McKinsey published a conversation between Derek Waldron, Chief Analytics Officer at JPMorgan Chase, and Kevin Buehler - then a senior partner at McKinsey who helped found the firm's risk practice and co-led global corporate investment banking - on how the world's largest bank is rebuilding itself around AI. 

Two principals who had known each other for nearly two decades. One running an eighteen-billion-dollar technology programme reaching 250,000 people. The other carrying thirty years of pattern recognition across global finance. Each holding far more complexity than any single piece could survive, in the most regulated industry there is, where one over-claim carries real consequences.

My role here was similar to that I now play for founders: take expert, senior, divergent thinking and forge a single account clear enough for a broad audience to follow, sharp enough to be worth their time, and true enough that both principals, and a compliance-sensitive institution, would put their names to it. In coverage awash with AI, the one decision that shaped everything was to make the piece human. I anchored it not on the technology but on the two-decade friendship at its centre, and on how Derek and Kevin's understanding of AI had grown alongside their relationship. JPMorgan Chase had already been quoted everywhere on what it was spending, so I steered away from the investment story toward the less-told one: what Derek had learned about people while getting a 250,000-strong bank to actually adopt AI. Most of the industry was still running pilot.