AI to handle your finances? Morgan Stanley is opening up to agents in a big way

Morgan Stanley is allowing clients to deploy AI agents that interact directly with ShareWorks and Equity Edge. The move signals a wider Wall Street push towards agentic software handling routine work.

In Short

• Morgan Stanley will allow AI agents to access its platforms
• Clients may no longer need to log in themselves
• Wall Street is increasingly preparing for an AI-agent future

For decades, software companies have built platforms designed for human users. If you wanted information, you logged in, searched for it, and completed tasks yourself. Morgan Stanley believes that model may soon become outdated. The financial giant is preparing for a future where AI agents, rather than humans, interact directly with its systems. In other words, instead of users logging into company platforms to retrieve information or complete tasks, AI agents could do the work for them.

A new way to access financial data

Morgan Stanley, which helps corporations, governments, institutions, and individuals raise, manage, and distribute capital, is changing how its clients access data and insights from its stock administration platforms, ShareWorks and Equity Edge. The company is now allowing clients to deploy AI agents that can interact directly with these platforms.

Morgan Stanley sees this as a future state where clients will no longer need to log into software built for human users to access important data and insights. Instead, AI agents will retrieve information, perform tasks, and execute workflows on their behalf.

According to CNBC, Mark Mitchell, Chief Product Officer of Morgan Stanley at Work, said clients will be "using agentic AI-powered tools on their desktops within the four walls of their companies, interacting with our platforms in a purely agentic way."

AI agents could replace many routine tasks

The bank has already granted a handful of clients early access to these capabilities and plans to expand availability to its 3,400 administration clients by next year, CNBC reported.

The move reflects a broader shift taking place across Wall Street, where firms are increasingly preparing for a future in which AI agents handle tasks currently performed by software users.

To make this possible, Morgan Stanley is relying on the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open-source standard that allows AI models to connect directly with data sources and external systems.

Why companies are interested

Morgan Stanley's pitch to corporate clients is relatively simple. Fast-growing technology and biotechnology companies are managing increasingly complex stock plans. Traditionally, handling that complexity would require hiring more support staff in departments such as human resources. Mitchell believes AI agents can take over parts of that work without requiring companies to add more employees.

The bank is applying the same logic internally. According to Mitchell, agentic AI could help Morgan Stanley expand customer support, plan administration, and its wealth management funnel without hiring "thousands and thousands" of additional employees.

The shift highlights how quickly software is evolving.

In the pre-AI era, companies generally wanted customers to access services through their own websites and applications. Businesses spent decades trying to attract users to proprietary platforms and keep them there.

Morgan Stanley, which began partnering with OpenAI in 2022, believes that may matter less in a future where AI agents become the primary interface between people and software.

"Software is at an inflection point, clearly," Mitchell said.

Wall Street's AI race is accelerating

Morgan Stanley is not alone in exploring agentic AI. Rivals such as JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs are already using AI agents internally for tasks like writing code. However, they have not publicly announced plans to allow external AI agents to connect directly to their systems.

Goldman Sachs is also working with Anthropic, the maker of Claude AI, on AI agents designed to handle accounting and other specialised roles.

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