Morgan Stanley uses ChatGPT to help financial advisors

Morgan Stanley officially launched the era of generative AI on Wall Street.

The bank plans to announce Monday that the assistant it created with OpenAI’s latest generative AI software is “fully operational” for all financial advisors and their support staff, according to a memo obtained by CNBC.

“Financial advisors will always be at the center of Morgan Stanley’s wealth management universe,” Morgan Stanley co-chairman Andy Saperstein said in the note. “We also believe that generative AI will revolutionize client interactions, bring new efficiencies to advisor practices, and ultimately help free up your time to do what you do best: serve your clients .

Morgan Stanley, a leading investment bank and wealth management giant, made waves in March when it announced that it was working on an assistant based on OpenAI’s GPT-4. Competitors including Goldman Sachs And JPMorgan Chase announced projects based on generative AI technology. But Morgan Stanley is the first major Wall Street firm to put a tailored solution based on GPT-4 in the hands of its employees, according to Jeff McMillan, head of analytics, data and innovation at Morgan Stanley Wealth Management.

Called AI@Morgan Stanley Assistant, the tool gives financial advisors quick access to the bank’s “intellectual capital,” a database of about 100,000 reports and research papers, McMillan said in a recent interview.

By saving advisors and customer service employees time when it comes to questions about markets, recommendations and internal processes, the assistant allows them to engage more with customers, he said. he declares.

The tool, a simple text window, disguises the difficulty of ensuring the program will produce quality responses, according to McMillan. The bank spent months retaining documents and bringing in human experts to test the answers, he said.

One adjustment for advisors is that they will have to phrase questions in full sentences as if they were speaking to a human, instead of relying on keywords as they would with a search engine query , McMillan said.

“It’s no different than how I would ask you a question, it’s how you talk to this machine,” he said. “People aren’t used to that.”

This is just the first in a series of generative AI-based solutions planned by the bank, according to McMillan. The firm pilots a tool called Debrief that automatically summarizes the content of client meetings and generates follow-up emails.

Using OpenAI software required a fundamentally different approach than previous technology efforts, he said. OpenAI’s ChatGPT uses large language models, or LLMs, to create human-sounding answers to questions.

“The traditional way to solve these problems is to write code,” McMillan said. “In the new world, you give examples of what “good” looks like, and the system learns what good is. It is actually able to “reason” and apply logic that a human would apply.”

Excitement about AI has boosted the stock market this year and forced entire industries to grapple with its implications, leading some experts to declare it the next fundamental technology.

“I’ve never seen anything like this in my career and I’ve been working in artificial intelligence for 20 years,” McMillan said. “We saw a window of opportunity that was completely disruptive, and I think as an organization we didn’t want to be left behind.”