Customer stories

Morgan Stanley

Morgan Stanley wealth management deploys GPT-4 to organize its vast knowledge base.

Morgan Stanley
March 14, 2023

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A leader in wealth management, Morgan Stanley maintains a content library with hundreds of thousands of pages of knowledge and insights spanning investment strategies, market research and commentary, and analyst insights. This vast amount of information is housed across many internal sites, largely in PDF form, requiring advisors to scan through a great deal of information to find answers to specific questions. Such searches can be time-consuming and cumbersome. 

With the help of OpenAI’s GPT-4, Morgan Stanley is changing how its wealth management personnel locate relevant information.

Starting last year, the company began exploring how to harness its intellectual capital with GPT’s embeddings and retrieval capabilities—first GPT-3 and now GPT-4. The model will power an internal-facing chatbot that performs a comprehensive search of wealth management content and “effectively unlocks the cumulative knowledge of Morgan Stanley Wealth Management,” says Jeff McMillan, Head of Analytics, Data & Innovation, whose team is leading the initiative. GPT-4, his project lead notes, has finally put the ability to parse all that insight into a far more usable and actionable format.

“You essentially have the knowledge of the most knowledgeable person in Wealth Management—instantly”, McMillan adds. “Think of it as having our Chief Investment Strategist, Chief Global Economist, Global Equities Strategist, and every other analyst around the globe on call for every advisor, every day. We believe that is a transformative capability for our company.”

You essentially have the knowledge of the most knowledgeable person in Wealth Management—instantly. We believe that is a transformative capability for our company.

Jeff McMillan, Head of Analytics, Data & Innovation for Morgan Stanley Wealth Management
Morgan Stanley AI Chatbot

Over the last few years, large language models have fundamentally altered the way companies put knowledge to work, much like the web did a few decades ago. For Morgan Stanley Wealth Management, McMillan breaks it down into three parts. The first part is GPT4’s “extraordinary capability to access, process and synthesize content almost instantaneously.” It’s trained on vast amounts of text on the internet and builds relationships between the words, sentences, concepts, and ideas. 

The second part, McMillan says, is Morgan Stanley’s intellectual capital. The company was founded almost 100 years ago and publishes thousands of papers annually covering insights on capital markets, asset classes, industry analysis, and economic regions around the globe. This wealth of knowledge creates a unique internal content repository for Morgan Stanley to process and parse using GPT-4 while also being subject to the firm’s internal controls.

The last part, McMillan says, are its people: Morgan Stanley’s huge team of financial advisors and their expertise in serving clients. They have trained GPT-4 to make the internal chatbot as helpful as possible for Morgan Stanley’s needs. Today, more than 200 employees are querying the system on a daily basis and providing feedback. The focus will always be on getting advisors the insight they need, in the format they need, instantly. McMillan says the effort will also further enrich the relationship between Morgan Stanley advisors and their clients by enabling them to assist more people more quickly.

The wealth management firm is also evaluating additional OpenAI technology with the potential to enhance the insights from advisor notes and streamline follow-up client communications.

“Key to ensuring good client service is our ability to invest at scale in technology,” he continues. “OpenAI is perhaps the best example to date of empowering Morgan Stanley with the marriage of human advice and technology—something to which we are completely committed. This endeavor has been particularly rewarding. The buy-in and engagement across the organization has been impressive.”

OpenAI is perhaps the best example to date of empowering Morgan Stanley with the marriage of human advice and technology—something to which we are completely committed.

Jeff McMillan, Chief Analytics and Data Officer, Morgan Stanley