The experience of having a chatbot listen to a wealthy client’s talk with a Morgan Stanley banker about their investments may soon be different.

The bank will launch a generative artificial intelligence bot this month after testing it with 1,000 financial advisors for a few months. The bot was created in collaboration with OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. The program’s specifics have not yet been revealed.

The bot will eventually learn how to assist advisers in managing clients’ finances on topics like taxes, retirement savings, and inheritances, draught a meeting summary of the conversation with the clients’ permission, update the bank’s sales database, schedule a follow-up appointment, and more.

In contrast, bankers may utilise the chatbot to retrieve information or forms quickly without having to comb through millions of documents.

Sal Cucchiara, chief information officer of wealth and investment management at Morgan Stanley and one of the executives leading the bank’s drive into AI, predicted that “the impact (of AI) will be very significant,” possibly equal to the arrival of the internet.

Before the rapidly expanding programme ChatGPT became widely used, Cucchiara, who was entrusted with constantly scouring Silicon Valley for possible software vendors, met OpenAI executives in 2022.

“It quickly became clear we needed to partner with them, they were far ahead of everybody else,” he said.

After that, Boris Power, a technical employee at the business, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman travelled to California to talk about a cooperation with Andy Saperstein, co-president and head of wealth management at Morgan Stanley.

They agreed to a contract last summer, and Morgan Stanley now has first dibs on wealth management product development. The two companies’ executives celebrated over a dinner sponsored by Saperstein, a potential CEO contender for the bank.

OpenAI chose not to respond.

While the bot will provide financial advisors with administrative help and insights, giving investing advice will still be left to humans.

“The adviser is still at the center,” said Cucchiara. For now, employees view the technology as a helpful tool and aren’t worried that they’ll be replaced by bots, he said.

The AI programme is a component of Morgan Stanley’s plan to advance its wealth division, whose second-quarter net revenue rose 16% to a record high and saw a $90 billion increase in new customer assets.

James Gorman, the CEO, aspires to manage $10 trillion in assets after driving a number of significant mergers that increased funding for the wealth industry.

In its AI endeavours, Morgan Stanley is not acting alone. Banks currently employ AI to crunch figures, spot fraud, and examine client transactions, but Wall Street behemoths are pursuing more complex applications of generative AI, which can produce text, images, and other types of data.

The largest U.S. lender, JPMorgan Chase, appointed Teresa Heitsenrether as its top data and analytics officer in June to spearhead the deployment of AI. Since its debut in 2018, Erica, the virtual assistant from rival Bank of America, has interacted with customers more than one billion times.

According to Nick Reed, chief product officer at Moody’s Analytics, the company is also collaborating with OpenAI and Microsoft to create a research assistant that clients may utilise.

According to Michael Abbott, global banking lead at consulting firm Accenture, large banks are the most advanced among financial firms in their adoption of AI, but asset managers, dealers, and insurers are also using it.

“We’re beginning to see customer services led by artificial intelligence spread among the largest banks,” said Abbott, who is working on hundreds of case studies with lenders looking to use AI.

(Adapted from ThePrint.in)