Morgan Stanley has a new OpenAI-powered chatbot for its financial advisors

Morgan Stanley Wealth Management is looking to leverage generative artificial intelligence to help its financial advisors do away with busy work.

The New York-based investment bank will roll out Debrief, a genAI assistant, that will support its financial advisors, Morgan Stanley said Wednesday. The assistant, built on OpenAI’s GPT-4, deepens the Wall Street giant’s AI use as banks seek to capitalize on the burgeoning tech.

The assistant will sit in on advisors’ meetings with client consent, the company said. Afterwards, Debrief will surface action items, summarize key points, draft emails, and save notes into Salesforce.

Vince Lumia, head of Morgan Stanley Wealth Management client segments, said in a statement that the tool “drives immense efficiency in an advisors’ day-to-day, allowing more time to spend on meaningful engagement with their clients.”

Jeff McMillan, Morgan Stanley’s head of firmwide artificial intelligence, told CNBC that “the quality and depth of the notes” taken by Debrief are “significantly better” than those by analysts.

“The truth is, this does a better job of taking notes than the average human,” he said.

Debrief is the next step in the bank’s partnership with ChatGPT-maker OpenAI. In March 2023, Morgan Stanley became the AI company’s only wealth management partner. The firm rolled out AI @ Morgan Stanley Assistant, a GenAI chatbot that helped financial advisors access the bank’s vast array of technical know-how, last September. Already, 98% of its financial advisor teams have adopted the assistant, the bank said.

“As we reach critical mass in our AI @ Morgan Stanley endeavors, we envision a world where AI serves as an efficiency enhancing interaction layer that sits between our colleagues and the many applications they interact with such as execution and order entry, CRMs, reporting tools and risk analysis, just to name a few,” McMillan said in a statement.

Morgan Stanley will roll out Debrief to its almost 16,000 wealth advisors over the next couple of weeks.

AI on Wall Street

AI use cases at major Wall Street banks have ballooned in recent years, as financial institutions race to deploy the technology.

Mary Erdoes, the head JPMorgan Chase’s wealth and asset management unit, said at the company’s annual investor day event in May that it has its own version of a large language model, dubbed ChatCFO, that will support the work of JPMorgan’s finance team.

The largest U.S. bank by assets, which has been a leader in AI adoption, is training every new hire to use AI. Erdoes said JPMorgan bankers have reduced the time they spend “hunting and pecking,” using AI to call up information on potential investments and accelerate their decision-making. This has helped save some analysts between two to four hours of what she refers to as “no joy work” each day.

Daniel Pinto, president of JPMorgan, said at the same May event that the technology will be “very, very impactful” for the bank’s 60,000 developers and 80,000 operations and call-center employees, which comprise almost half the company’s headcount. He added that AI use cases at JPMorgan are roughly valued at between $1 billion to $1.5 billion.

Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon similarly said there are “enormous opportunities for productivity gains and also opportunities for efficiency,” given the implementation of AI in the investment bank’s own business practices.