Morgan Stanley reshapes the future of financial services with AI

how do you create more capacity how do you allow our financial advisers to have better conversations and more of them what this technology does is it makes you as smart as the smartest person in the organization my name is Jeff McMillan I am the head of firmwide AI here at Morgan Stanley we and financial services are an incredibly regulated uh business and while many people say to us well how did you get out in front of this and I would respond by saying large financial institutions like Morgan Stanley are not new to complex regulatory environments we had to work in deep collaboration I give open AI a tremendous amount of credit that experience I think has been really helpful and has led us to actually accelerate our efforts the question was where do you start and we wound up in a spot where we agreed that we would focus on the intellectual Capital that sits between the firm and our financial advisers we're a global organization we have 880,000 plus employees we have a lot of information available to employees but their ability to be able to effectively find that information was always a challenge my name is Caitlyn Elliott I work in our firmwide artificial intelligence team and I lead our generative AI Solutions team one of the things that we recognized early on was that we had to set up a strong testing and evaluation framework we would sit with open Ai and we'd say okay based off of all of the questions we input here are all the outputs what are the things we can change about our retrieval methods that can help the accuracy that we need at Morgan Stanley we were finding that employees were only able to find about 20% of the documents in our whole knowledge repository we recognized that maybe this was a way to take our knowledge base that we have and give it to the AI and see if that could almost democratize the access to the information and when we hooked up the artificial intelligence into our assistant we actually found that now the coverage is about 80% of the documents have been clicked on and then the question became where do we point you know where do we go next so after we had success with the assistant the first thing that came to everyone's mind was a meeting summarization tool and especially when you think of our environment at a place like Morgan Stanley when you were meeting with clients those meeting notes are critical so the feedback we're getting from clients is really positive now they're getting a follow-up email the same day sometimes an hour after the conversation and so they feel like the customer service level has increased that their advisor more engaged with the conversation that they're having and that they're able to kind of have those actionable key takeaways immediately what I'm excited about is the thing I can't see yet because when you give this technology and you democratize access to it in an organization with smart people they're going to come up with things that I don't even know what they look like they're going to build something that's going to change our business model and I think that's what's most exciting to me