The signage is posted in front of Morgan Stanley & Co.’s headquarters in New York’s Times Square district.
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Morgan Stanley continues to advance its adoption of artificial intelligence with a new assistant that is expected to save thousands of hours of work for the bank’s financial advisors.
The assistant, called Debrief, keeps detailed logs of advisor conversations and automatically creates email drafts and summaries of the conversations, bank executives told CNBC. Morgan Stanley plans to make the program available to the company’s approximately 15,000 advisors by early July. This represents one of the most significant steps to date in the use of generative AI at a major Wall Street bank.
While the company’s previous efforts were to create a ChatGPT-like service to help advisors navigate the company’s extensive research, Debrief brings AI into direct contact with advisors’ most valuable resource: their relationships Customers.
According to Jeff McMillan, head of enterprise artificial intelligence at Morgan Stanley, the program, built using OpenAI’s GPT-4, essentially takes part in client Zoom meetings and replaces the note-taking that consultants or junior staff took by hand.
“We’re finding that the quality and depth of the notes are just significantly better,” McMillan told CNBC. “The truth is that he is better at taking notes than the average person.”
Consent required
Importantly, clients must consent to the recording each time the debrief is used. Future versions will allow advisors to use the program during in-person meetings on company devices, McMillan said.
The launch will serve as a real-world test of the touted productivity gains of generative AI, which has taken Wall Street by storm in recent months, boosting the value of chipmakers, tech giants and the broader U.S. stock market.
Morgan Stanley’s wealth management division conducts about 1 million Zoom calls annually, the bank told CNBC. While estimates vary, a Morgan Stanley consultant involved in the Debrief pilot said the program saves 30 minutes of work per session; Consultants typically spend time after meetings creating notes and action plans to address clients’ needs.
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Morgan Stanley’s new Debrief program, a new AI tool for wealth management advisors based on OpenAI’s GPT-4.
Courtesy: Morgan Stanley
“As a financial advisor, I do four, five or six meetings a day,” said Don Whitehead, a Houston-based advisor who tested the software. By integrating note taking with AI, you can really get involved in the meeting and actually be much more present.
It remains to be seen what consultants will do with the hours they get back for basic work. In some ways, Morgan Stanley’s generative AI projects represent a “grand productivity experiment,” McMillan said.
If, as McMillan and others believe, advisors spend more time serving clients and acquiring new clients, the technology should boost Morgan Stanley’s growth in assets under management and retention of clients and advisors.
Morgan Stanley’s wealth management division is one of the largest in the world, with $5.5 trillion in client assets as of March. The company wants to reach $10 trillion.
It will take at least a year to determine whether the technology increases advisor productivity, McMillan said.
“I’m the analyst, but advisors will tell you they do their best when interacting with clients,” McMillan said. “None of them will tell you that they love taking notes or looking at research reports, right? That’s not why they got into this business.”
The broader vision
Ultimately, Morgan Stanley’s vision for AI is to create a technology layer that seamlessly helps advisors do all of their tasks — sending proposals, balancing portfolios, creating reports — and with simple prompts, said Jed Finn, head of wealth management at Morgan Stanley, investors in February.
Many of the core tasks being automated, such as analyzing contracts and opening accounts, are common across Morgan Stanley, including in the trading and banking departments, McMillan said.
According to a recent study, financial professions are among the professions most affected by AI Citigroup Report. According to Citigroup, adopting AI could increase industry profits by $170 billion by 2028.
Although the process is still in its infancy, McMillan acknowledged that business models will likely change in ways that are difficult to predict.
“I think there will be disruption in some areas,” he said. “We look back at all the things we think we’re going to lose, but we don’t see what lies ahead.”
What lies ahead is the need for millions of fast engineers training AI to deliver desired outcomes for businesses, McMillan said; It took Morgan Stanley months to refine the debriefing prompts, he noted.
McMillan said he even told his teenage children they should consider careers as speed engineers.
“You will learn how to talk to machines and tell those machines what to do and how to interact and collaborate with people,” he said. “It’s a completely different game than the way we’ve worked before.”
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2024-06-26 15:08:20
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