Bing Guan | Bloomberg | fake images
Morgan Stanley is advancing its adoption of artificial intelligence with a new assistant that is expected to take on thousands of hours of work for the bank's financial advisors.
The assistant, called Debrief, keeps detailed records of advisors’ meetings and automatically creates draft emails and summaries of discussions, bank executives told CNBC. Morgan Stanley plans to roll out the program to the firm’s roughly 15,000 advisors in early July — one of the biggest steps yet for generative AI use at a major Wall Street bank.
While the company's previous efforts involved creating a ChatGPT-like service to help advisors navigate the company's wealth of research, Debrief puts AI in direct contact with advisors' most precious resource: his relationships with wealthy clients.
The program, built using OpenAI's GPT4, essentially integrates into clients' Zoom meetings, replacing the note-taking that advisors or junior employees have been doing by hand, according to Jeff McMillan, head of artificial intelligence at Morgan Stanley.
“What we're finding is that the quality and depth of the notes are significantly better,” McMillan told CNBC. “The truth is, this thing takes notes better than the average human being.”
Consent required
Importantly, clients must consent to being recorded each time Debrief is used. Future versions will allow advisors to use the program on corporate devices during in-person meetings, McMillan said.
The launch will serve as a real-world test for the vaunted productivity gains of generative AI, which has taken Wall Street by storm in recent months and bolstered the value of chipmakers, tech giants and the U.S. stock market overall.
Morgan Stanley's wealth management division receives about 1 million Zoom calls a year, the bank told CNBC. While estimates vary, a Morgan Stanley advisor involved in the Debrief pilot said the program saves 30 minutes of work per meeting; Advisors often spend time after meetings creating notes and action plans to address clients' needs.
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 has been testing the software. By “having the note-taking service integrated through AI, you can really get involved in the meeting, you're actually much more present.”
It remains to be seen what advisors will do with the hours taken away from essential heavy lifting. In a sense, Morgan Stanley's generative AI projects amount to a “grand productivity experiment,” McMillan said.
If, as McMillan and others believe, advisors will spend more time serving clients and seeking new ones, the technology should drive growth in Morgan Stanley's assets under management, as well as client and advisor retention.
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 billion dollars.
It will take at least a year to determine whether the technology is increasing advisor productivity, McMillan said.
“I'm the analytics guy, but advisors will tell you they're at their best when they're 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 layer of technology that seamlessly helps advisors perform all their tasks (submit proposals, balance portfolios, create reports) with simple prompts, the boss told investors. Morgan Stanley wealth management director Jed Finn in February.
Many of the core tasks that will be automated, such as analyzing contracts and opening accounts, are universal across Morgan Stanley, including the trading and banking divisions, McMillan said.
Financial jobs are among the most likely to be displaced by AI, according to a recent study citi group report. AI adoption could boost industry profits by $170 billion by 2028, Citigroup said.
While 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 and think about all the things we think we're going to lose, but we don't see what's coming.”
What is to come is the need for millions of agile engineers to train AI to create the desired results; It took Morgan Stanley months to fine-tune the guidelines for the Debrief, he said. McMillan said he even told his teenage children to consider careers as speed engineers.
“They will learn to talk to machines, tell them what to do, interact with people and collaborate,” he said. “It's a completely different game than how we've been working.”
