AI: Morgan Stanley to open its wealth management funnel to agents

Morgan Stanley will soon open a key wealth management funnel to artificial intelligence agents from thousands of corporations, CNBC has learned exclusively. It’s one of the earliest instances of a major Wall Street bank opening its platforms to external AI tools.

The move will allow clients’ autonomous agents to pull data and insights directly from the firm’s stock administration platforms, ShareWorks and Equity Edge, bypassing the traditional software interfaces built for human users, according to Mark Mitchell, chief product officer of Morgan Stanley at Work.

In April, Morgan Stanley executives attributed $1.2 trillion in assets gathered to its workplace strategy.

“The way we see it, in a future state, our corporate clients will not be logging into ShareWorks or Equity Edge,” Mitchell said.

Instead, they’ll be “using agentic AI-powered tools on their desktops within the four walls of their companies, interacting with our platforms in a purely agentic way,” he said.

The bank has already granted a handful of clients early agentic access and plans to open it up to the firm’s 3,400 administration clients by next year, Mitchell said.

It’s the latest sign that Wall Street is preparing for a future where AI agents handle tasks now performed by software users.

Rivals including JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs are using AI agents internally for things like writing code, but have yet to publicly announce steps to allow external agents to connect directly to their firms’ systems.

Morgan Stanley has taken the staid business of managing stock compensation plans for corporations and turned it into a crucial funnel for the firm’s wealth management division, which is the world’s largest at $7.35 trillion in client assets.

The firm acquired Solium Capital in 2019 and E-Trade in 2020, creating a business that it says caters to almost half of the companies in the S&P 500 and eight of the 10 biggest unicorn startups. The key insight it had was that by administering employee stock plans, Morgan Stanley can convert workers into advisory clients as their wealth grows.

The bank’s AI pitch to corporate clients is straightforward: Fast-growing technology and biotech companies want to administer increasingly complex stock plans without adding headcount in support roles like human resources, said Mitchell.

At these companies, AI agents can handle aspects of the job without adding human employees, he said.

Internally, there’s a similar logic: Morgan Stanley sees agentic AI allowing it to scale its own services — customer support, plan administration, the wealth management funnel — without adding “thousands and thousands” of employees, Mitchell said.

For this change, Morgan Stanley is leaning on something called the Model Context Protocol, an open source standard that allows AI models to plug into data sources.

In a pre-AI world, companies would’ve frowned upon allowing clients to bypass the online front door to their services. For decades, companies fought to hook users on proprietary platforms.

Morgan Stanley, which began partnering with OpenAI in 2022, believes that matters less in a world where AI agents become the primary interface. Software is “at an inflection point, clearly,” Mitchell said.

“The companies that are going to survive in the future are the ones who have proprietary data and business logic, which is the foundation of our offering,” Mitchell said.

“The fact that they won’t be logging into” the websites, he said, “doesn’t scare us at all.”