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Morgan Stanley executives believe its new AI assistant, “Debrief,” will be saving thousands of hours of labor for the company’s 15,000 advisors by early July.
Speaking to CNBC, Morgan Stanley said Debrief will perform the typical grunt work for advisors, including detailed note-taking and summarizing meetings, as well as automatically drafting emails.
This includes taking logs of the meetings between advisors and Morgan Stanley’s clients. Advisors are only able to use the tool, which can be switched on during Zoom meetings, once the client has consented.
It marks a breakthrough in the use of AI to replace human work on Wall Street. The program’s rollout is scheduled for the coming days and weeks, having taken Morgan Stanley months to fine-tune its prompts.
‘Does a better job than the average human’
Jeff McMillan, Morgan Stanley’s Head of Firmwide Artificial Intelligence, said this will replace work that advisors or junior employees were doing by hand.
“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.”
The bank hopes that future versions of the tool will allow advisors to also use Debrief during in-person meetings.
Morgan Stanley told CNBC that the company’s wealth management advisors host around 1 million Zoom calls per year, with one advisor who took part in the program’s pilot phase claiming it saves 30 minutes of work per meeting.
If their estimations are correct, this could save Morgan Stanley a possible 500,000 hours of labor per year.
“As a financial adviser I’m doing four, five or six meetings a day,” said Don Whitehead, a Houston-based advisor who has used Debrief told CNBC.
Where will the reclaimed hours go?
Whitehead observed the widely touted benefit of AI – that knowledge workers can be freed up from low-value, time-intensive, administrative tasks – adding that by using the tool, “you can really be invested in the meeting, you’re actually a lot more present.”
However, Morgan Stanley acknowledged that it is not sure exactly where the thousands of hours saved by Debrief will go.
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McMillan described the bank’s AI work as “a grand experiment in productivity,” adding that it would take a year to measure whether the tool actually improves productivity or not.
“I’m the analytics guy, but the advisors will tell you that they’re at their best when they’re engaging” with clients,” he said. “None of them will tell you they love taking notes or looking at research reports, right? That’s not why they got into this business.”
Morgan Stanley has previously stated a goal to create AI tools that help advisors perform all tasks with simple prompts. The company is exploring the automation of tasks including parsing contracts and opening accounts, McMillan told CNBC.
“I think that there will be disruption in some areas,” he added. “We look back on all the things that we think we’re going to lose, but we don’t see what’s ahead.”
McMillan believes companies like Morgan Stanley, the wider financial industry, and businesses in general will have a critical need for prompt engineers.
“It’s a whole different game than how we’ve been doing work,” he finished.
