Morgan Stanley OpenAI-powered assistant to roll out for wealth advisors

Morgan Stanley is pushing further into its adoption of artificial intelligence with a new assistant that is expected to take over thousands of hours of labor for the bank’s financial advisors.

The assistant, called Debrief, keeps detailed logs of advisors’ meetings and automatically creates draft emails and summaries of the discussions, bank executives told CNBC. Morgan Stanley plans to release the program to the firm’s roughly 15,000 advisors by early July, marking one of the most significant steps yet for the use of generative AI at a major Wall Street bank.

While the company’s earlier efforts involved creating a ChatGPT-like service to help advisors navigate the firm’s reams of research, Debrief brings AI into direct contact with advisors’ most prized resource: their relationships with rich clients.

The program, built using OpenAI’s GPT-4, essentially sits in on client Zoom meetings, replacing the note-taking that advisors or junior employees have been doing by hand, according to Jeff McMillan, Morgan Stanley’s head of firmwide artificial intelligence.

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

Importantly, clients must consent to being recorded each time Debrief is used. Future versions will allow advisors to use the program on corporate devices during in-person meetings, said McMillan.

The rollout will serve as a real-world test for the vaunted productivity gains of generative AI, which took Wall Street by storm in recent months and has bolstered the value of chipmakers, tech giants and the broader U.S. stock market.

Morgan Stanley’s wealth management division hosts about 1 million Zoom calls a year, the bank told CNBC. While estimates vary, one Morgan Stanley advisor involved in the Debrief pilot said the program saves 30 minutes of work per meeting; advisors typically spend time after meetings creating notes and action plans to address client needs.

“As a financial adviser I’m doing four, five or six meetings a day,” said Don Whitehead, a Houston-based advisor who’s been testing the software. By “having the note-taking service built in through AI, you can really be invested in the meeting, you’re actually a lot more present.”

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.

If, as McMillan and others believe, advisors will spend more time serving clients and prospecting for new ones, the technology should…