NEW YORK, June 9 -- The question Wall Street is quietly working through is how much of its own labor a machine can be trusted to do. JPMorgan Chase keeps revising its answer upward. The largest bank in the United States plans to deploy a new generation of artificial intelligence agents later this year that can work on their own for hours at a stretch, rather than the few minutes today's versions manage, the next step in a drive to run more of the bank without people.

The bank's technology chief described the shift in an interview reported on Tuesday. The agents are moving from tools that finish a single task to what the industry has started calling digital workers, software that manages a whole workflow across several disconnected progra...