Understanding how to successfully implement AI in your organization is one thing, but actually doing so can be a different challenge. In a case study of Morgan Stanley, Columbia Business School professors Stephan Meier and Jeffrey Schwartz found that setting up employees for success while working with AI requires strong leadership, extensive employee engagement, and a human-centric approach.
Ahead of introducing an innovative new AI-based wealth management system, Morgan Stanley took a highly collaborative approach, holding hundreds of meetings with advisors to understand their concerns and incorporate their feedback.
The system, known as Next Best Action (NBA), uses an AI engine to give investment and wealth management recommendations to financial advisors to share with their clients. The system does much to increase engagement between Morgan Stanley advisors and their clients, but that’s not the only reason the company’s employees have embraced it so readily and at such a high rate.
The key, according to Meier, was in Morgan Stanley’s method of implementation.
“It’s about assuring employees that [managers are not] taking your job. They simply want you to make your job better,” Meier says.
Morgan Stanley managers communicated clearly that the goal of the new system was to augment the advisors’ work, not replace them. They also provided research showing how the AI could free up time for more valuable client interactions.
Morgan Stanley also focused on building trust in NBA by allowing advisors to override the recommendations if needed. And they never made it mandatory, in order to give agency to the advisors. In the end, buy-in was widespread and over 90 percent of financial advisors are now using NBA in their daily work. And learning from its experience with NBA, the company added more AI tools in collaboration with OpenAI, the San Francisco start-up behind ChatGPT.
Jeff McMillan, head of AI at Morgan Stanley, who worked with Meier and Schwartz on the case study, said 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. The buy-in and engagement across the organization has been impressive.”
