NASHVILLE, Tenn. — All financial institutions need an AI strategy in place in 2025 to keep pace with evolving use cases.

Five years from now, everyone will wonder how they got anything done without automation, Koren Picariello, managing director and head of generative AI strategy and execution at $6.2 trillion wealth management firm Morgan Stanley, said today during a fireside chat at Bank Automation Summit 2025.

“I think we’re at the precipice of the next real change, where writing our own email will start to feel very foreign,” she said. “We were the author of everything we did instead of the editor.”

AI isn’t perfect and it’s critical that financial institutions audit the accuracy of their output — but not using AI at all is where the real risk lies, she said.

“You can’t do nothing,” Picariello said, “Especially with how quickly these technologies are evolving.”

Financial institutions must decide how they want to approach gen AI investment and development, whether this means integrating the tech into their legacy systems or modernizing their core systems in tandem with AI deployment, Picariello said.

“Waiting until you’ve modernized the foundational platform may be too late,” she said.

The decision of whether to implement new core platforms is similar to the buy versus build decision when it comes to adding AI capabilities.

Morgan Stanley, she said, “made a conscious decision to build things and productionalize them, knowing full well that there’s a real possibility that three years from now, it gets replaced by something that we’ve bought,” she said.

Morgan Stanley’s gen AI assistant

Morgan Stanley in 2022 partnered with OpenAI, becoming the first wealth management firm to team up with an AI provider, Picariello said. The FI rolled out its gen AI virtual assistant in September 2023, Picariello.

The assistant, called AI @ Morgan Stanley Assistant, is now used by nearly 100% of the Financial Advisor teams, which is critical for optimizing the tool’s effectiveness, she said.

Advisors no longer need to analyze 150 pages of multiple research articles before getting back to a client with answers, she said. With the gen AI assistant, advisors can synthesize the documents and provide clients with an assessment in one second, said Picariello.

“First you start with efficiency and, ultimately, what efficiency leads to is effectiveness,” she said.

Follow coverage of Bank Automation Summit 2025 at finainews.com.