An Executive Built a Personal 'Jamie Dimon' With AI. Here's How

A senior financial services executive named Ryan Sparks built himself an AI version of JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon — and says it changed how he makes decisions.

Sparks told Fast Company that earlier in his career he had regular access to Dimon, engaging with his operating committee and occasionally with the CEO directly. Dimon challenged assumptions, pushed for bigger thinking, and asked questions that made people pause. When Sparks changed roles and organizations, that access disappeared. Mentors and advisors remained, but nobody matched that caliber of thinking discipline.

So Sparks used generative AI to codify the relentless questioning Dimon embodied and embed it in an agent he could call on to challenge his assumptions and expose his blind spots. The authors of the piece — professors and organizational change practitioners — frame the bigger question: what if senior leaders stopped treating Gen AI primarily as a tool for producing work and started using it to improve how they think?

Why real boards don't always deliver friction

Senior leaders already have boards, executive teams, mentors, coaches, and advisors. Each relationship carries constraints. Corporate boards have governance responsibilities. Executive teams have organizational duties and personal agendas. Mentors have limited time. And the more senior you become, the harder it is to find people who tell you what they really think about your strategies.

The pressure is rising at the same time. The authors cite Gen AI's impact on business models and jobs, growing geopolitical risk, and shifting executive tenures as the forces CEOs must now interpret.

Their answer: a personal AI board of directors built around the thinking you're missing. They ground the design in Albert Bandura's work on human agency, which identifies four qualities: intentionality, forethought, self-reactiveness, and self-reflectiveness. Doing all four well is hard under pressure — which is why board composition matters.

Who sits on the AI board?

The authors recommend five personas, each modeled on a real leader:

• The Provocateur (Jamie Dimon). Questions sacred cows and consensus. Dimon, discussing AI displacing truck drivers, warned: "you can't lay off 2 million truckers tomorrow." He called for phasing in automation alongside retraining.
• The Systems Architect (Satya Nadella). Asks what must change operationally for a strategy to work. To prepare Microsoft for the AI era, Nadella replaced the long-standing senior leadership team with groups focused on governance, engineering, and Copilot, and began reviewing AI metrics weekly.
• The Pattern Spotter (Reed Hastings). Separates meaningful signals from hype. Netflix moved from DVDs to streaming, then from distributing content to producing its own — acting before each next model was obvious.
• The Outside-In Voice (Mira Murati). Imports ideas from other industries. Murati's career crossed automotive technology, product development, and frontier AI.
• The Humanist (Jacinda Ardern). Forces leaders to confront human costs before rollout. After the 2019 mass shootings in New Zealand, Ardern helped turn public grief into gun control legislation and communicated uncertainty directly.

How to build it

The method is concrete. Pick one decision you're wrestling with. Choose the leaders whose perspectives would help most. Feed an AI system — ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, or Gemini — first-person source material on how those leaders think: shareholder letters, interviews, speeches, books, podcasts, public testimony.

Then put the board to work. The authors suggest sample prompts for each seat. Ask the provocateur: "What are we all accepting as true that deserves to be challenged?" Ask the systems architect: "What must change in how my organization operates for this strategy to work? Where is the friction?"

One caution shapes the whole exercise: once the AI board has spoken, make the decision yourself. The best use of a Gen AI board, the authors argue, is creating more friction before you make the final judgment. Leaders who want a "Mark Cuban" instead of a "Jamie Dimon" can build that too — the board is only as unique as the source material behind it.