Morgan Stanley has a new innovation chief. Expect more OpenAI-like partnerships.

Getting down to business

Upon returning to New York, Manahan now has to figure out how to ready the bank for emerging technology trends. He and his 50-or-so reports aim to bring alignment between the innovation council, the work in the lab, and the businesses and set a blueprint for how the bank will execute its technology initiatives.

This also helps focus the work they do with the roughly 250 projects that go through Morgan Stanley’s innovation lab, which are each tied to a business objective and sponsored by the business, Manahan said. Companies are identified through organic discovery and inbound referrals from other groups within the firm.

“We work with the business on experimenting, evaluating them, and then it’s up to them, the business, to make a decision on how to take it forward,” Manahan said.

One theme he is keeping a close eye on is the evolution of generative AI.

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

AI agents, which can execute task-based workflows that are human-approved, could be the next step after AI co-pilots, which are more like somebody helping you, sitting next to you, and assisting you, Manahan said.

To be clear, AI agents aren’t something the bank is currently adopting, Manahan said, “but it’s where the market is evolving towards and where we see the next leap forward for this technology.”