Morgan Stanley Wealth Management (MSWM) is running a series of tests with its financial advisors on the use of OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT.

The chatbot has seen a sharp rise in public adoption since its introduction in November 2022 and a $10 billion funding injection from Microsoft.

As of March, API access was introduced for both ChatGPT and Whisper, OpenAI’s speech recognition software, paving the way for wealth managers and financial advisors to incorporate the technology into their offerings.

MSWM will use GPT-4, the fourth multimodal large language model recently released by OpenAI, to “access, process and synthesise content” from its own library of research and data to be used by financial advisors.

The technology allows users to use natural language prompts to elicit answers from the chatbot and enables ‘human-like’ conversations.

According to MSWM’s co-president and head Andy Saperstein, the technology is “a game changer in synthesising our expansive intellectual capital, bringing the value and richness of it to a whole new level, and in the process freeing up valuable time for Financial Advisors to do what they do best—serve their clients”.

The testing will initially focus on 300 of MSWM’s advisors before being rolled out to all 16,000 of the firm’s advisors.

While the technology’s ability to process reams of complex information in a matter of seconds is seen as a great attraction, some concerns remain about the accuracy of its data analysis.

Indeed, Morgan Stanley’s own analysts stated in a research note released in February that ChatGPT “sometimes hallucinates and can generate answers that are seemingly convincing but are actually wrong”.

Consequently, the Morgan Stanley analysts advocated that generative AI applications such as ChatGPT would best be used as “an augmentation to existing labour rather than a substitution”.

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