Morgan Stanley has inaugurated the era of generative AI on Wall Street. According to a memo obtained by CNBC, the bank intends to announce on Monday that the assistant it developed using OpenAI’s most recent generative AI software is “fully live” for all financial advisors and their support staff.
Andy Saperstein, co-president of Morgan Stanley, said in the memo, “Financial advisors will always be at the center of Morgan Stanley wealth management’s universe.” “We also believe that generative AI will transform client interactions, introduce new efficiencies to advisor practices, and ultimately free up time for you to do what you do best: serve clients.”
Morgan Stanley, a leading investment bank and wealth management behemoth, made headlines in March when it announced it had been developing a GPT-4-based assistant. Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase, among others, have announced projects founded on generative AI technology. According to Jeff McMillan, director of analytics, data, and innovation for Morgan Stanley wealth management, Morgan Stanley is the first major Wall Street firm to provide employees with a customized GPT-4-based solution.
McMillan stated in a recent interview that the AI @ Morgan Stanley Assistant provides financial advisors quick access to the bank’s “intellectual capital,” a database of approximately 100,000 research reports and documents.
The assistant enables advisors and customer service representatives to spend more time with clients by saving them time on queries about markets, recommendations, and internal procedures, he said.
With human speech
According to McMillan, the tool, a simple text window, belies the difficulty of ensuring that the program will generate quality responses. He stated that the bank spent months compiling documents and testing responses with human experts.
McMillan explained that advisors will need to phrase queries in full sentences, as if speaking to a person, rather than relying on keywords as they would with a search engine query.
“Just as I would ask you a question, that’s how you communicate with this machine,” he explained. “People are not accustomed to that.”
According to McMillan, this is the first in a series of solutions based on generative AI intended by the bank. The company is testing an application called Debrief that autonomously summarizes client meetings and generates follow-up emails.
“Absolutely disruptive”
Using OpenAI software necessitated an essentially different strategy than previous technological endeavors, he explained. OpenAI’s ChatGPT employs large language models, or LLMs, to generate responses to questions that sound human.
McMillan stated that traditionally, these problems would be resolved by writing code. “In the new world, you demonstrate what ‘good’ looks like, and the system learns what ‘good’ means. It can actually’reason’ and employ logic similar to that of humans.”
This year, AI enthusiasm has boosted the stock market and forced entire industries to consider its implications, prompting some experts to declare AI the next foundational technology.
I’ve never seen anything like this in my career, and I’ve been doing artificial intelligence for 20 years. We saw a window of opportunity that was just completely disruptive, and I think as an organization, we didn’t want to get left behind.
Jeff McMillan
