JPMorgan Chase & Co. has a head start when it comes to developing and deploying artificial intelligence in banking, according to a new study.

The Wall Street bank hires more people with skills needed for AI, files more patents and makes more public pronouncements on the uses and ethical implications of the technology, the Evident AI Index published Thursday shows.

The ranking draws on 143 publicly-available data points for 23 major banks. Seven of the top 10 were based in North America, including Royal Bank of Canada and Toronto-Dominion Bank. Canada has been investing heavily in emerging technology and was the first country in the world to publish an AI strategy in 2016.

“In contrast, most European banks are struggling to differentiate themselves or to build coherent AI programs at the scale and scope of their US counterparts,” Annabel Ayles, Evident co-founder and chief operating officer, said in an interview. The three European banks in the top ten were UBS Group AG, ING Groep NV and BNP Paribas SA.

It comes at a time of increased attention on AI as it leaps from cutting-edge concept to daily tool for data-crunching and communication. Microsoft Corp. this week announced a $10 billion investment in OpenAI, whose AI tool ChatGPT is trained on troves of data to generate human-like responses.

Firms are expected to spend more than $500 billion on AI software, hardware and services in 2023, according to the International Data Corp., while consultancy McKinsey has said AI technologies could potentially add as much as $1 trillion of value to global banking annually through improvements in areas such as fraud analytics, targeted marketing and automated accounting.

Yet there is also a “fundamental” lack of transparency in how big business invests in AI, according to Alexandra Mousavizadeh, Evident co-founder and chief executive officer. “We’re cracking open this black box of very different approaches to AI adoption through this data.”

–By Aisha S Gani (Bloomberg)