• Sean Manahan was named Morgan Stanley’s firmwide chief innovation officer in April.
• It outlines its job and how the innovation lab interacts with the rest of the bank.
• Here’s his strategy for “meeting the moment” with emerging technologies after a week in Silicon Valley.

When Morgan Stanley and OpenAI announced their blockbuster partnership in early 2023, it signaled a competitive advantage for the Wall Street bank.

Morgan Stanley has since developed together A handful of productive AI tools with AI power for lucrative asset management business. Morgan Stanley isn’t the only financial firm using OpenAI. But strategic partnership paid the bank money Early access to OpenAI’s new products and the ability to test and customize them in the bank’s innovation lab, which spans approximately 18,000 square feet at its 1 New York Plaza office in Manhattan.

Could be the spark of partnership Tracked until 2021 A team at Morgan Stanley responsible for researching technology vendors met with a promising nonprofit research organization to assess its applicability in the financial services industry.

“We were trying to understand how would this technology or capability support our business?” Sean Manahan, whose team attended that meeting, told Business Insider: He reported his findings to then-asset management leaders Andy Saperstein and Jeff McMillan, saying, “We were able to show them, ‘Here’s something emerging that we’ve been observing and investigating,’ and they understood it.” And it clicked, and we’ve taken it to the next level in that respect, we realize it’s going to be important for us.”

Now Manahan is looking to repeat that success, settling into his new role as Morgan Stanley’s firmwide chief innovation officer after a week of meetings with technology leaders and the bank’s top executives.

In his new role, Manahan oversees the bank’s innovation council, which was launched at the beginning of the year. The council is dedicated to identifying the bank’s technology focuses. Today, these areas include managing and managing data consistently across businesses rather than individually, the impact of artificial intelligence and AI-driven intermediaries, and the future of software engineering. This is to ensure that Morgan Stanley can benefit from external innovations, just as it has in the past. with zoom before the pandemic and before OpenAI Wall Street’s productive artificial intelligence move.

“We understand how innovation happens, we understand how market innovation happens, and we understand how to meet that moment and then mentor companies and help them grow,” Manahan told BI in his first interview since his appointment in April.

A week in Silicon Valley

In September, Manahan and a group of other Morgan Stanley executives descended on Silicon Valley for Technology Week; from every business division, innovation council, company-wide AI team, cybersecurity, legal, compliance and risk, to name a few.

Morgan Stanley is hosting the event to meet people in the venture capital community as well as technology companies of all sizes, from early-stage startups to established growing companies and Big Tech giants. More than just learning about new advances in data governance, artificial intelligence, and the future of engineering, Morgan Stanley executives are expected to align internally and with third parties on their priorities and desired outcomes.

“After three intense days in the Valley meeting with all these interesting companies and thought leaders like venture capitalists, they now come back to Morgan Stanley with a whole new set of different ideas and conclusions that they want to drive as they think about 25, 26, 27,” Manahan said. He talked about the event and its impact on the company’s roadmap for the next three years.

get to work

After returning to New York, Manahan now needs to figure out how to prepare the bank for emerging technology trends. It and its 50 or so reports aim to create alignment between the innovation council, work at the lab and businesses, and create a plan for how the bank will execute on technology initiatives.

This also helps them focus on what they are doing. There are about 250 projects that have gone through Morgan Stanley’s innovation lab, each tied to a business goal and supported by the company, Manahan said. Companies are identified through organic discovery and referrals from other groups within the firm.

“We work with the business to run experiments, evaluate them, and then it’s up to them, the business, to decide how to move this forward,” Manahan said.

One of the topics he follows closely is the evolution of generative artificial intelligence.

“We’re starting to see a shift towards executive functions; these tools can plan, they can create tasks themselves, they can interact with people and say: ‘I planned this, does this seem right to you? ‘I’m thinking of doing this next, does this look right to you?’ “And then they execute based on that human guidance,” Manahan said of the AI ​​agents.

Manahan said AI agents that can execute task-based workflows that people approve of could be the next step from AI co-pilots, who are more like someone helping you, sitting next to you, helping you.

To be clear, AI agents are not something the bank is currently embracing, Manahan said: “But that’s where the market is evolving and where we see the next breakthrough for this technology.”