Intelligent search engine

Elsewhere, Morgan Stanley is describing its new Natural Language Programming bot, AskResearch as “kind of like having a junior analyst”. It’s a similar product to the internal search engines that JPM and Goldman have developed – it uses queries from readers to build up a picture of the structure of a research note, so it can extract the key paragraphs and charts which answer important questions. All well and good … but that’s not actually a particularly junior role! Drawing clients’ information to the bits of the research department’s output which are actually relevant to their questions is one of the core competencies of an equities salesperson. The only higher level function left once that is automated is knowing which questions to ask. Although given that it’s likely to be the sales desks’ queries that are being used to train these things, maybe it’s sensible for the banks to pretend that they’re only going to replace juniors.