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OpenAI is taking aim at some of Wall Street’s most labor-intensive tasks with a new version of ChatGPT designed to research companies, analyze financial data and generate the presentations that investment bankers rely on.
The product unveiled Thursday, called ChatGPT for Financial Services, is a tailored version of its enterprise product, ChatGPT Work, that was made with “design partners” Morgan Stanley and Evercore, according to OpenAI’s Vice President of Product, Nick Turley. It uses the AI company’s latest and most advanced model, GPT-6 Astra.
The rollout puts OpenAI deeper into territory traditionally occupied by Wall Street’s entry-level bankers, the recent college graduates called analysts and associates that the industry has employed for decades to research deals and create pitchbooks. It also showcases the company’s continued push into enterprise offerings as it gears up for what is widely expected to be a blockbuster IPO.
“We’re effectively teaching ChatGPT to research like an analyst and back up its conclusions like an analyst as well,” Turley said during a briefing announcing the new product.
OpenAI has spent much of the last year racing to win over business customers in the fiercely competitive enterprise market, where it’s working to fend off rivals including Anthropic and Google. Anthropic announced its own tailored solution for Wall Street, Claude for Financial Services, last year.
Sarah Friar, OpenAI’s finance chief, told investors in August that the company’s enterprise business accounted for more revenue than its consumer business, which took off following the launch of ChatGPT in 2022.
Turley told reporters during the briefing OpenAI plans to release tailored solutions for “a number of sectors” beyond financial services.
In a live demonstration of the new offering, Turley showed the platform analyzing a potential M&A target, pulling financial figures from industry-standard data sources and creating a formatted PowerPoint deck based on a bank’s preformatted style guide.
“It’s very easy to make slides that look good, but it’s much harder to make slides [that] actually make sense,” Turley said. “To get here, ChatGPT had to choose the relevant peers. It had to pull the prices into a spreadsheet. It had to check the chart against the data, and it had to explain the selloff and the rebound.”
Banker disruption?
What separates this version from the product it’s based on, ChatGPT Work, is native data access from LSEG, Daloopa and Pitchbook that furnishes the system with things like financial statements and earnings transcripts, as well as automated access to users’ existing data subscriptions.
Other features tailor-built for finance include citations that allow users to trace data back to source filings and audit charts, as well as administrative controls for sensitive deal materials.
While Turley said that there was “a ton of demand” for this version of ChatGPT, which is initially geared toward investment banking and equity research, he declined to name banks that have signed on for it.
When asked by CNBC whether this latest version of ChatGPT would reduce the need for investment banks to hire junior bankers, Turley framed the release as an efficiency boost that maximizes productivity per employee.
“If you study the life of an analyst or of a banker, depending on the industry, they’re working 100-hour weeks,” Turley said. “I think in the same way that Microsoft Excel transformed the industry and allowed them to produce better analysis faster, you will see technology like this do the same.”
Still, the product raises fundamental questions for an industry long built on a rigorous apprenticeship model. If generative AI can execute multistep tasks like research and pitchbook formatting in minutes, Wall Street will be forced to rethink how it trains, and how many it needs, of its next generation of dealmakers.
Last month, Chris Churchman, the Goldman Sachs partner in charge of one the bank’s flagship AI projects, warned that the automation of tasks that help train junior bankers risks causing “cognitive atrophy” in the next generation of financiers.
“Reasoning is still important,” Churchman said at the time. “You still need to reason about [problems] and structure it into an argument, and now we’re delegating reasoning.”
