Morgan Stanley Expands OpenAI-Powered AskResearchGPT to Institutional Securities Division

Morgan Stanley rolls out AskResearchGPT to institutional securities staff

This content has been selected, created and edited by the Finextra editorial team based upon its relevance and interest to our community. AskResearchGPT can be used to look for data, obtain insights and summarize information from more than 70,000 proprietary reports published annually by the bank. Investment banking sales and trading staff now have one-click access to the GenAI assistant embedded within their day-to-day workflow, providing a more comprehensive, in-depth view of the most current research information. The workflow integration gives staff a single-click option to transfer findings of their queries into an email draft ready to be modified and customized before sharing with clients. Findings include hyperlinks to citations of relevant research materials providing staff and clients with the ability to dive deeper into the original research. "AskResearchGPT gives our client-facing teams a leg up, freeing capacity to more deeply engage with clients while providing better than ever service. It is an important step in delivering a firmwide Research platform that is not only omnipresent across our tools but will ultimately extend its capabilities with other information sources, skills and languages," says Eden Kidner, head of technology strategy for Morgan Stanley Research. "We continue to experiment with the most recent generative AI improvements, identifying other opportunities to enhance our employee and client engagement." Morgan Stanley pioneered the use of generative AI on Wall Street via a partnership with Open AI, which was announced in spring of 2023. AskResearchGPT is the first use case in the institutional securities arena, joining a growing suite of generative AI powered tools including the AI @ Morgan Stanley Assistant and AI @ Morgan Stanley Debrief, which were rolled out to the firm's wealth management financial advisors and staff over the course of the past year.

AI on the trading floor: Morgan Stanley expands OpenAI-powered chatbot tools to Wall Street division

Morgan Stanley sign on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York on Jan. 24.Michael Nagle / Bloomberg via Getty Images Morgan Stanley is expanding the use of OpenAI-powered, generative artificial intelligence tools to its vaunted investment banking and trading division, CNBC has learned. The firm, which launched an AI assistant based on OpenAI's ChatGPT technology to its wealth management advisors in early 2023, began rolling out another version called AskResearchGPT this summer in its institutional securities group, said Katy Huberty, Morgan Stanley's global director of research. The tool lets users extract answers from across the universe of Morgan Stanley's research -- including on stocks, commodities, industry trends and regions -- collapsing what could otherwise be the cumbersome task of gleaning insights from the more than 70,000 reports produced annually by the bank. "We see it as a game changer from a productivity standpoint, both for our research analysts and our colleagues across institutional securities," Huberty said in an interview. The tool helps staff "access the highest quality, most insightful information as efficiently as possible." Since its arrival as a viral consumer app in late 2022, OpenAI's generative AI technology has been swiftly adopted by Wall Street's largest players. Morgan Stanley says that close to half of its 80,000 employees are using generative AI tools created with OpenAI, while at rival JPMorgan Chase, about 60% of the firm's 316,043 employees have access to a platform using OpenAI's models, said a person with knowledge of the matter who wasn't authorized to disclose the figure publicly. The San Francisco-based startup recently raised money at a $157 billion valuation. OpenAI already has network advantages in financial services because of its ample funding and early focus on use cases for banks, said Pierre Buhler, a banking consultant with SSA & Co. "They are ahead of everyone else in terms of market penetration," Buhler said."But it is an emerging market, and we are still at the very beginning." It's likely that competitors to OpenAI such as Anthropic will gain use over time, he added. Viral hit At Morgan Stanley, a leader in global investment banking and trading along with JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs, employees have gravitated toward AskResearchGPT, using it instead of getting on the phone or lobbing an email to the research department, Huberty said. Employees are asking the tool three times the number of questions as compared with a previous tool based on traditional AI that's been in use since 2017, according to the bank. It's most in-demand among salespeople and other client-facing staff who often field questions from hedge funds or other institutional investors, said Huberty. "We found that it takes a salesperson one-tenth of the time to respond to the average client inquiry" using AskResearchGPT, she said. Productivity boost In a recent demonstration, the GPT-4 based chatbot was able to summarize Morgan Stanley's position on matters from copper to Nvidia to the finer points of standing up a data center, understanding industry-specific jargon and providing charts and links to source material. The bank wants to push adoption further in light of the productivity gains it's seeing, Huberty said. The tool is embedded within workers' browsers as well as Microsoft Teams and Outlook programs to make it readily available. Understandably, Huberty says she is often asked if AI could ultimately replace the analysts who are creating the reams of research published under Morgan Stanley's banner. "I don't see in the near future a path to just having the machine write the research report to generate the idea," she said. "I really think that it's humans who make the call and own the relationship, which is a really important part of the analyst job, or sales and trading job, or corporate banker job."

AI on the trading floor: Morgan Stanley expands OpenAI-powered chatbot tools to Wall Street division

A screen displays the trading information for Morgan Stanley on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), January 19, 2022. Morgan Stanley is expanding the use of OpenAI-powered, generative artificial intelligence tools to its vaunted investment banking and trading division, CNBC has learned. The firm, which first rolled out an AI assistant based on OpenAI's ChatGPT technology to its wealth management advisors in early 2023, began testing another version called AskResearchGPT this summer in its institutional securities group, according to Katy Huberty, Morgan Stanley's global director of research. The tool lets users extract answers from across the universe of Morgan Stanley's research -- including on stocks, commodities, industry trends and regions -- collapsing what could otherwise be the cumbersome task of gleaning insights from the over 70,000 reports produced annually by the bank. "We see it as a game changer from a productivity standpoint, both for our research analysts and our colleagues across institutional securities," Huberty said in an interview. The tool helps staff "access the highest quality, most insightful information as efficiently as possible." Since its arrival as a viral consumer app in late 2022, OpenAI's generative AI technology has been swiftly adopted by Wall Street's largest players. Morgan Stanley says that close to half of its 80,000 employees are using generative AI tools created with OpenAI, while at rival JPMorgan Chase, about 60% of the firm's 316,043 employees have access to a platform using OpenAI's models, said a person with knowledge of the matter. The San Francisco-based startup recently raised money at a $157 billion valuation. At Morgan Stanley, a leader across investment banking and trading along with JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs, employees have gravitated toward AskResearchGPT, using it instead of getting on the phone or lobbing an email to the research department, Huberty said. Employees are asking the tool three times the number of questions as compared to a previous tool based on traditional AI that's been in use since 2017, according to the bank. It's most in-demand among salespeople and other client-facing staff who often send research highlights and field questions from hedge funds or other institutional investors, said Huberty. "We found that it takes a salesperson one-tenth of the time to respond to the average client inquiry" using AskResearchGPT, she said. In a recent demonstration, the GPT-4 based chatbot was able to summarize Morgan Stanley's position on matters from copper to Nvidia to the finer points of standing up a data center, understanding industry-specific jargon and providing charts and links to source material. The bank wants to push adoption further in light of the productivity gains it's seeing, Huberty said. The tool is embedded within workers' browsers as well as Microsoft Teams and Outlook programs to make it readily available. Understandably, Huberty says she is often asked if AI could ultimately replace the analysts who are creating the reams of research published under Morgan Stanley's banner. "I don't see in the near future a path to just having the machine write the research report to generate the idea," she said. "I really think that it's humans who make the call and own the relationship, which is a really important part of the analyst job, or sales and trading job, or corporate banker job."