AI on the trading floor: Morgan Stanley expands OpenAI-powered chatbot tools to Wall Street division

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Morgan Stanley is expanding the use of OpenAI-powered, generative artificial intelligence tools to its vaunted investment banking and trading division, CNBC has learned.

The firm, which launched an AI assistant based on OpenAI's ChatGPT technology to its wealth management advisors in early 2023, began rolling out another version called AskResearchGPT this summer in its institutional securities group, said Katy Huberty, Morgan Stanley's global director of research.

The tool lets users extract answers from across the universe of Morgan Stanley's research — including on stocks, commodities, industry trends and regions — collapsing what could otherwise be the cumbersome task of gleaning insights from the more than 70,000 reports produced annually by the bank.

«We see it as a game changer from a productivity standpoint, both for our research analysts and our colleagues across institutional securities,» Huberty said in an interview. The tool helps staff «access the highest quality, most insightful information as efficiently as possible.»

Since its arrival as a viral consumer app in late 2022, OpenAI's generative AI technology has been swiftly adopted by Wall Street's largest players.

Morgan Stanley says that close to half of its 80,000 employees are using generative AI tools created with OpenAI, while at rival JPMorgan Chase, about 60% of the firm's 316,043 employees have access to a platform using OpenAI's models, said a person with knowledge of the matter who wasn't authorized to disclose the figure publicly. The San Francisco-based startup recently raised money at a $157 billion valuation.

OpenAI already has network advantages in financial services because of its ample funding and early focus on use cases