Signs are displayed outside Morgan Stanley & Co.’s headquarters. In the Times Square neighborhood of New York.
Michael Nagel | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Morgan Stanley continues to advance the adoption of artificial intelligence with a new associate expected to take on thousands of hours of work for the bank’s financial advisors.
The assistant, called “De Brief,” keeps detailed records of adviser meetings and automatically creates drafts of emails and summaries of discussions, bank executives told CNBC. Morgan Stanley plans to roll out the software to the firm’s roughly 15,000 advisors by early July, marking one of the most significant steps yet to use generative AI at a major Wall Street bank.
While the company’s previous efforts involved creating a ChatGPT-like service to help advisors navigate the scope of the company’s research, Debrief brings AI into direct contact with advisors’ most valuable resource: their relationships with wealthy clients.
The software, built using OpenAI’s GPT-4, essentially sits in on Zoom meetings with the client, replacing the note-taking that consultants or junior staff used to do manually, according to Jeff McMillanHead of Artificial Intelligence at Morgan Stanley.
“What we found is that the quality and depth of the observations is much better,” McMillan told CNBC. “The truth is, he does a better job of taking notes than the average human.”
Most importantly, clients must agree to be recorded each time debriefing is used. McMillan said future versions will allow advisors to use the software on company devices during in-person meetings.
The rollout will serve as a real-world test of the vaunted productivity gains of generative AI, which have taken Wall Street by storm in recent months and boosted the value of chipmakers, tech giants and the broader U.S. stock market.
Morgan Stanley’s wealth management division hosts about 1 million Zoom calls annually, the bank told CNBC. While estimates vary, one Morgan Stanley advisor involved in the debriefing trial said the program saves 30 minutes of work per meeting; Consultants typically spend time after meetings writing notes and action plans to meet clients’ needs.
Morgan Stanley’s new debriefing software, a new AI tool for wealth management advisors based on OpenAI’s GPT-4.
Courtesy: Morgan Stanley
“As a financial advisor, I have four, five, six meetings a day,” said Don Whitehead, a Houston-based advisor who is testing the program. By “integrating an AI note-taking service, you can really invest in the meeting, you’re actually more present.”
It remains to be seen what consultants will do with the hours recovered from core work. In some ways, Morgan Stanley’s projects in generative AI amount to “a grand experiment in productivity,” McMillan said.
If, as McMillan and others believe, advisors are spending more time serving clients and seeking new ones, technology should boost Morgan Stanley’s growth in assets under management, as well as client and advisor retention.
Morgan Stanley’s wealth management division is one of the largest in the world $5.5 trillion In client assets as of March; The company wants to reach $10 trillion.
McMillan said it will take at least a year to determine whether the technology is enhancing advisors’ productivity.
“I’m an analytics guy, but advisors will tell you they’re at their best when they’re engaging” with clients, McMillan said. “None of them are going to tell you they like taking notes or looking at research reports, right? That’s not why they got into this business.”
Ultimately, Morgan Stanley’s vision for artificial intelligence is to create a layer of technology that helps advisors seamlessly perform all their tasks — sending proposals, balancing portfolios, generating reports — with simple prompts, the head of wealth management at Morgan Stanley said. Where is it good? He told investors in February.
McMillan noted that many of the core tasks set to be automated, such as contract analysis and account opening, are global across Morgan Stanley, including the trading and banking departments.
Finance jobs are among the jobs most likely to be replaced by artificial intelligence, Citigroup recently reported a report. Citigroup said adopting artificial intelligence could boost industry profits by $170 billion by 2028.
While the process is still in its infancy, McMillan acknowledged that business models are likely to change in ways that are difficult to predict.
He added: “I think there will be unrest in some areas.” “We look back and look at all the things we think we’re going to lose, but we don’t see what lies ahead.”
What lies ahead is the immediate need for millions of engineers to train AI to achieve desired outcomes for businesses, McMillan said. He noted that it took Morgan Stanley months to adjust the debriefing claims.
McMillan said he asked his teenage children to consider careers as speed engineers.
“They will learn how to talk to machines, tell them what to do, communicate with people and collaborate with them. It’s a completely different ball game from the way we used to do our work,” he said.
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