Morgan Stanley Set for Full Rollout of AI Chatbot for Advisors

After running a pilot test of a generative artificial intelligence chatbot earlier this year with 1,000 financial advisors, Morgan Stanley is set to roll out the software to all of its advisors — which numbered about 16,000 in 2021 — by Sept. 30. But it’s also working on a note-taking pilot program that advisors could see introduced further down the road.

“The impact will be very significant,” said Morgan Stanley Chief Information Officer Sal Cucchiara in a recent interview with Reuters.

The technology being fully introduced this month lets advisors work with a virtual assistant that accesses hundreds of thousands of documents, including advice and forecasts published by the firm’s Global Investment Office, which provides portfolio guidance.

Advisors view the AI responses and source materials to validate the accuracy of answers the system churns out. The software synthesizes information to get to the heart of questions, eliminating the need for advisors to pore over long documents for a specific answer.

But the bank also has been working on technology that could draft a summary of advisor-client conversations, as well as an email that would include next steps and even arrange follow-up appointments, which Cucchiara described to ThinkAdvisor earlier this summer.

This technology, he said, works as follows: “If, say, I’m on a call with a client, I can record it with the client’s permission and afterward be able to synthesize the transcript and summarize the whole call, telling the client in an email exactly what we talked about and agreed on. That not only would take a long time to do without AI, but AI simplifies the output, which the advisor can see before sending.”