Morgan Stanley taps AI to do “grunt work”: report

Morgan Stanley’s money men will no longer need to spend hours writing up notes from endless Zoom calls after the bank’s bosses decided artificial intelligence should perform this most thankless task for them, CNBC reported on Wednesday.

The financial news network said that executives will roll out a new AI assistant, known as Debrief, for 15,000 advisors by the start of next month that will automatically draft emails and summaries of any discussions.

Debrief will essentially sit in on any meetings, jettisoning the need for staff to take notes by hand, CNBC quoted Jeff McMillan, the bank’s head of internal artificial intelligence, as saying.

It will free up financiers to focus on their uber-wealthy clients, who must consent to AI recording the meetings, and give them more time to take in new business for the Wall Street titan.

Morgan Stanley’s wealth division manages an estimated $5.5 trillion in client assets.

“What we’re finding is that the quality and depth of the notes are just significantly better,” McMillan said “The truth is, this does a better job of taking notes than the average human.”

“I’m the analytics guy, but the advisors will tell you that they’re at their best when they’re engaging” with clients, he added. “None of them will tell you they love taking notes or looking at research reports, right? That’s not why they got into this business.”

The plan is to develop future versions that will allow AI to write up accurate summaries of in-person meetings in what McMillan called a “grand experiment in productivity.”

CNBC reported that Morgan Stanley’s wealth management division hosts about 1 million Zoom calls a year and that the Debrief would shave off 30 minutes of work for every meeting.

It remains to be seen what advisors will do with the hours reclaimed from essential grunt work. In a sense, Morgan Stanley’s projects in generative AI amount to a “grand experiment in productivity,” said McMillan.

The bank says the first results of that experiment will be seen in about a year.

It aims to bring in AI to carry out other core tasks such as opening accounts or working on contracts.

The top executive said he had even told his teenage children to consider careers as AI prompt engineers, experts who create the text-based instructions for the technology to work .

“They’re going to learn how to talk to machines, and tell those machines what to do, and engage with people and collaborate,” he said. “It’s a whole different game than how we’ve been doing work.”

A Citigroup report released earlier this month estimated that as many as 54% of jobs in the banking sector could be replaced with artificial intelligence, boosting the industry’s coffers by $170 billion.

It has plans to equip its 40,000 coders with the ability to experiment with different AI technologies, while JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon has claimed it could cut the work week to just 3.5 days by the time today’s kids make their first steps in the work place.