Jigar Thakkar - 00:07
There are a lot of use cases for generative AI, for driving efficiencies and data collection and all of those improvements in those areas. But the most exciting thing is to provide for a very complex portfolio AI driven insights, for example. A geospatial explorer for all your climate risks on a map, for example, and ask MSCI chatbot that can answer all the questions related to indexes or your portfolio. I believe, when you transform the client experience and drive efficiencies in the client's workflow and help them make faster, better decisions, that is the main purpose of generative AI in the industry. But to power all of that, you require a lot of capital investments. That's another area where generative AI is very helpful in creating huge amount of efficiencies in pretty much every part of the company.
Strengthening AI Teams - 00:54
We are always recruiting new talent all the time. In terms of our own engineers and our own company. We have a lot of efforts for upskilling. We have monthly hackathons, we have training programs, we have AI champions across the entire company, in every single function, we have a lot of conversations about the best practices, what we've learned. We do demos every month to show off how AI has helped us produce better code faster, end to end, projects getting completed faster, and so on so forth. So there are many different ways we're upskilling our engineers. It's also a very exciting time for our developers. They're able to get rid of a lot of their grunt work so it's very exciting time, and this is the way we are driving a lot of productivity improvements in engineering.
Championing AI - 01:43
It's very critical to drive the AI advocacy across the industry and inside MSCI. I talk with the largest clients frequently. We talked with them about what is AI doing at MSCI? What can we do for their products and their workflow? We have to talk to the technology industry to have them focus on their efforts, specifically targeted towards financial data investment models, in fact. And then you look at we go to conferences like Google Next to give presentations of what MSCI is doing to create this general awareness of what is going on then there are the internal elements. How do we make sure we reach every developer, every data analyst, every financial director, show them what are the different AI tools they can use? How can it make them work on their core, core tasks better faster, and help them save more time to focus on higher value activities. So there is a constant communication and advocacy we have to do internally as well as externally.
Challenges scaling GenAI in finance - 02:39
There are a lot of implications of using a very highly sophisticated piece of technology like generative AI, but you want to make sure your costs under control, that you're doing this in a very fiscally responsible manner, and the quality is high grade, and you it's repeatable can seem like it's slowing you down, but in the end you have to invest time and energy into things like quality and automation, compliance training and cost of AI.
Transforming client experiences with AI - 03:10
Every firm has to think about how generative AI can help them with driving efficiencies and productivity improvements. But the leading firms are going to look at how will generative-AI power phenomenal new client experiences? So I think the progressive companies are going to look at generative AI in a very holistic manner. Think about the scaling laws of AI and transfer that to what are the scaling laws for your company as you look at the wave of generative AI, are you going to ride that wave or you're going to be swept away from that wave? That really depends on how do you plan to scale your company using the power of generative AI?