Morgan Stanley’s money managers will no longer have to spend hours taking notes on endless Zoom calls, after executives at the bank decided to turn this most thankless job over to artificial intelligence, CNBC reported Wednesday.
The financial news network said executives plan to roll out a new AI assistant called “Debrief” to its 15,000 advisers by early next month, which will automatically draft emails and write summaries of every discussion.
CNBC quoted Geoff McMillan, the bank’s head of internal artificial intelligence, as saying that debriefings essentially remove the need for staff to sit in on every meeting and take handwritten notes.
This would allow financiers to focus on their ultra-high net worth clients, who must agree to have their meetings recorded by AI, giving them more time to land new business for Wall Street giants.
Morgan Stanley’s asset management division manages an estimated $5.5 trillion in client assets.
“We saw a huge improvement in the quality and depth of notes taken,” McMillan says. “In fact, the robot is a better note-taker than the average human.”
“I’m an analyst, and advisors will tell you they work best when they’re engaged with clients,” he added. “No one will say they love taking notes or looking at research reports. That’s not why they got into this business.”
The plan is to develop a future version where the AI can create accurate summaries of in-person meetings, in what McMillan calls a “grand productivity experiment.”
CNBC reported that Morgan Stanley’s asset management division hosts about 1 million Zoom calls a year, and Debrief has helped it shave 30 minutes off each meeting.
It remains to be seen what advisers will do with the time freed up from basic, menial tasks. In some ways, Morgan Stanley’s generative AI project amounts to a “grand experiment in productivity,” McMillan said.
The bank said the first results of the experiment would be available in about a year.
The company aims to use AI to perform other core functions such as opening accounts and drafting contracts.
The CEO said he told teenagers to consider careers as AI prompt engineers — professionals who write text-based instructions to make technology work.
“They’re going to learn how to talk to machines, how to tell machines what to do, how to engage and collaborate with people,” he said. “It’s a whole different game than how we’ve done work before.”
A Citigroup report released earlier this month estimated that up to 54% of banking jobs could be replaced by artificial intelligence, which could add $170 billion to the industry’s coffers.
The company plans to equip 40,000 programmers with the skills to experiment with various AI techniques, while JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon claims that the work week will be reduced to just 3.5 days by the time today’s children first step into the workplace.
