Morgan Stanley Introduces AI Assistant to Boost Advisor Productivity and Transform Wealth Management

Morgan Stanley is introducing an AI-powered assistant called Debrief to help its roughly 15,000 wealth advisors automate meeting notes, draft emails, and create client discussion summaries, marking a significant step in the adoption of generative AI on Wall Street.

How Debrief works: The program, built using OpenAI’s GPT-4, joins client Zoom meetings to replace the manual note-taking typically done by advisors or junior employees:

• Clients must consent to being recorded each time Debrief is used.
• The AI assistant keeps detailed logs of advisors’ meetings and automatically generates draft emails and summaries of the discussions.
• Morgan Stanley plans to release Debrief to all its advisors by early July.

Potential productivity gains: While estimates vary, one advisor testing Debrief said it saves 30 minutes of work per meeting, allowing advisors to be more present and engaged with clients:

• Morgan Stanley’s wealth management division hosts about 1 million Zoom calls a year.
• If Debrief boosts advisor productivity as expected, it could lead to growth in assets under management and improved client and advisor retention.
• However, it will take at least a year to determine the technology’s impact on productivity, according to Jeff McMillan, Morgan Stanley’s head of firmwide AI.

The broader vision for AI: Morgan Stanley ultimately aims to create an AI layer that seamlessly assists advisors with various tasks, from sending proposals to balancing portfolios, using simple prompts:

• Many of the core tasks set to be automated are universal throughout the bank, including at trading and banking divisions.
• While the process is still in its early stages, business models will likely change in hard-to-predict ways, potentially leading to disruption in some areas.
• The adoption of AI is expected to create a need for millions of prompt engineers to train AI systems to achieve desired outcomes for companies.

Analyzing deeper: Morgan Stanley’s rollout of Debrief serves as a real-world test for the potential productivity gains of generative AI in the financial industry. While the technology could significantly boost the bank’s growth and efficiency, it also raises questions about the long-term impact on employment and the evolving roles of financial professionals. As AI continues to advance, it will be crucial for companies to strike a balance between leveraging the technology’s benefits and managing its disruptive effects on the workforce.