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Morgan Stanley is further promoting the use of artificial intelligence, with new assistants expected to replace thousands of hours of work by the bank’s financial advisers.
Bank executives told CNBC that the assistant, named Debrief, would keep detailed logs of advisory meetings and automatically create draft emails and summaries of discussions. Morgan Stanley plans to release the program to the firm’s roughly 15,000 advisers by early July, marking one of the most significant steps yet for a major Wall Street bank to use generative artificial intelligence.
While the company’s early efforts involved creating services like ChatGPT to help advisors navigate a firm’s reams of research, Debrief puts artificial intelligence in direct contact with advisors’ most precious resource: their relationships with wealthy clients.
Built using OpenAI’s GPT-4, the program essentially sits in a client Zoom meeting, replacing hand-crafted notes from consultants or junior staff. Jeff MacMillanHead of corporate artificial intelligence at Morgan Stanley.
“We found that the quality and depth of the notes was significantly better,” MacMillan told CNBC. “The truth is, it’s better than the average person taking notes.”
Consent required
Importantly, the client must consent to being recorded each time a report is used. McMillan said a future version will allow advisors to use the program on company devices during in-person meetings.
The rollout will be a real-life test of the touted productivity gains from generative artificial intelligence, which has taken Wall Street by storm in recent months and boosted prices for chipmakers, tech giants and the broader U.S. stock market. value.
Morgan Stanley told CNBC that its wealth management unit receives about 1 million Zoom calls per year. While estimates vary, Morgan Stanley advisors involved in the report’s pilot said the program saved 30 minutes of work time per meeting; advisors typically spent time after the meeting establishing notes and action plans to address clients’ needs. need.
Morgan Stanley’s new Debrief program is 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 or six meetings a day,” said Don Whitehead, a Houston consultant who has been testing the software. With “a built-in note-taking service through artificial intelligence, you can really get involved in the meeting and you’ll actually be more focused.”
It remains to be seen how consultants will use the time taken back from important heavy lifting. In a sense, Morgan Stanley’s generative AI initiative amounts to “a great experiment in productivity,” MacMillan said.
If, as MacMillan and others believe, advisors will spend more time serving clients and finding new ones, the technology should help grow Morgan Stanley’s assets under management and retain clients and advisors.
Morgan Stanley’s wealth management unit is one of the largest in the world $5.5 trillion Client assets as of March; the company hopes to reach $10 trillion.
MacMillan said it will take at least a year to determine whether the technology improves advisers’ productivity.
“I’m an analyst, but consultants will tell you they’re at their best when they’re interacting with clients,” MacMillan said. “They’re not going to tell you they like taking notes or reading research, right? That’s That’s not why they got into this industry.”
A broader perspective
Ultimately, Morgan Stanley’s vision for artificial intelligence is to create a layer of technology that, through simple prompts, can seamlessly help advisors perform all tasks — sending proposals, balancing portfolios, creating Report. Jed Finn told investors in February.
MacMillan noted that many of the core tasks being automated, such as parsing contracts and opening accounts, are common across Morgan Stanley, including in the trading and banking divisions.
A recent survey revealed that finance jobs are among the most vulnerable to being replaced by artificial intelligence Citigroup Report. Citigroup says the adoption of artificial intelligence could boost industry profits by $170 billion by 2028.
While the process is still in its infancy, Macmillan acknowledged that business models may change in ways that are difficult to predict.
“I think there will be disruption in certain areas,” he said. “We look back at all the things we thought we would lose, but we can’t see what’s going to happen in the future.”
McMillan said millions of fast engineers will be needed in the future to train artificial intelligence to create the desired results for companies; he noted that Morgan Stanley spent months fine-tuning reporting prompts.
McMillan said he even tells his teenage children to consider careers as fast engineers.
“They will learn how to talk to machines, tell machines what to do, and how to interact and collaborate with people,” he said. “It’s a completely different game than how we work.”
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