The work on building its capabilities in investment banking and trading involves adding OpenAI-powered generative AI tools across all operations at Morgan Stanley. This is a feat following the successful pilot conducted earlier this summer of an AI assistant known as AskResearchGPT within the firm’s institutional securities group.
The tool, according to Katy Huberty, Morgan Stanley’s global director of research, aims to ease the process of research for the employees by permitting them to extract insights quickly from the bank’s huge database, which accumulates more than 70,000 reports every year. “We view it as a game changer from a productivity standpoint,” said Huberty, a blow to what the tool brings to help staff have quality information more efficiently.
Employees can have questions about stocks, commodities, and industry trends with the help of AskResearchGPT assistant rather than resort to traditional methods such as phone calls and emails. Adoption has increased user engagement nearly three times as employees ask three times more questions as an earlier AI tool adopted since 2017.
Today, around 50% of Morgan Stanley’s 80,000 staff use such generative AI technology. At JPMorgan Chase, about 60% of employees have access to such OpenAI-driven products. The way AI technology is being consumed in finance reveals that this industry has been keen to exploit such innovations and produce efficiency at the earliest.
Salespeople and front-office staff are most eager to use AskResearchGPT because they regularly receive questions from hedge funds, and other institutional investors. The tool has reduced response time by leaps and bounds; sales personnel can address client queries in one-tenth of the time it took them before.
With practical applications, the GPT-4-based chatbot has demonstrated its capabilities at synthesizing complex topics-understandably, such as how the bank sees commodities, including copper and technology companies such as Nvidia; it can reproduce relevant charts and source material. Further, the tool can be integrated into employees’ browsers, as well as into Microsoft Teams and Outlook.
However, this does not replace human analysts for now, and as Huberty reminds, “don’t see in the near future a path to just having the machine write the research report.” According to her, relationship management and expertise remain strong components of the analytical process in finance.
Morgan Stanley’s ongoing commitment to integrating advanced AI tools reflects the evolving landscape of the financial services sector, where technology continues to drive productivity and operational efficiency.
