Morgan Stanley said it completed the deployment of its second generative AI application last week, preferring self-developed solutions rather than buying off-the-shelf tools from technology providers. The new tool, called “AI @ Morgan Stanley Debrief,” summarizes video conference content and generates drafts for follow-up emails. This tool is the second generative AI application developed by Morgan Stanley in collaboration with OpenAI. The first application was an AI knowledge assistant tool launched in September 2023 to help financial advisors quickly find Morgan Stanley research information.
Morgan Stanley’s approach is to work directly with model builders rather than relying solely on off-the-shelf technology solutions. Alexandra Mousavizadeh, co-founder and CEO of Evident, said this self-developed approach is becoming more common in the financial services industry. “This way, you can design and customize it to make it better integrated into your workflow and more seamless,” she said. She also pointed out that this application is very useful for banks because it can process data within the bank and seamlessly integrate into the workflow of financial analysts. She mentioned that other industries such as insurance and retail would also benefit from this type of application.
Other examples include BNP Paribas, which announced a partnership with model builder Mistral AI this month. TD Bank also said it was working with Cohere this month. Mousavizadeh noted that most banks are working with multiple model makers on the market, including Meta Platforms’ Llama, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s GPT.
Both of Morgan Stanley’s tools were developed using OpenAI’s GPT model and were customized in collaboration with OpenAI. Morgan Stanley said that after evaluating the product market for this use case, they chose to build their own tools using OpenAI’s technology rather than buying an off-the-shelf solution.
Brad Lightcap, COO of OpenAI, said: “It is a great opportunity to work closely with Morgan Stanley to build and deploy AI that meets the needs of highly regulated industries.” Technology providers are increasingly offering comprehensive AI advanced products, although these products have not yet gained widespread acceptance among many enterprise customers. For example, tools such as Microsoft 365’s Copilot or Google Workspace’s Gemini require a lot of support in the enterprise, leading some CIOs to question the actual return of these tools relative to their high prices.
Meanwhile, cloud software vendors such as Workday and Salesforce.com have also reported disappointing revenue as their products have failed to resonate in the market, in part because companies prefer to build custom applications.
Morgan Stanley’s meeting summary tool, “Some people will say that you can use Zoom to summarize the meeting. Or you can use Teams to summarize. That’s true,” said David Wu, head of AI product and architecture strategy for Morgan Stanley. “But even so, the advantage of building and customizing is that it better meets the needs of our users.” For example, Morgan Stanley’s financial advisors typically use Microsoft Outlook to handle emails, use Zoom for meetings, and use Salesforce to record meeting content. By customizing its own tools, the company is able to integrate with all of these systems.
Wu said Morgan Stanley is also regularly evaluating its approach as companies like Microsoft and Salesforce continue to think about how to integrate their tools with each other. Wu noted that buying off-the-shelf tools has always been the firm’s normal approach. But he said that based on the current maturity of off-the-shelf tools, it makes more sense to build your own.
“We thought that rather than buying a product and having everyone relearn a new tool, we could just insert AI into existing workflows,” he said.
Morgan Stanley said it was too early to share results for the meeting summary tool. As for the AI knowledge assistant tool, they said 98% of teams used it regularly, but declined to share details on the tool’s financial returns.
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