Morgan Stanley draws from 'hundreds of conversations' with experts to build its AI

While artificial intelligence-powered tools are being promoted as the next wave of innovation in banking, there is a deep human effort involved in their construction. "You have to have hundreds and hundreds of conversations," with experts from many professional fields, said Jeffrey McMillan, Morgan Stanley's chief analytics and data officer, in a panel at the In Vest Conference. In the traditional way of machine learning, technologists might sift through millions of phone calls to train a bot. Since the bank does not record client calls and the daily customer issues financial advisers face are complex, Morgan Stanley has to find experts who can provide detailed answers to questions from the bank. "You build up a corpus of knowledge," McMillan said.