Stingy Banks Open Their Wallets to Microsoft’s AI; Automation Comes For Google’s Salespeople

If you want to know the extent to which businesses are embracing generative artificial intelligence, look no further than Wall Street. Quants and hedge funds are head over heels for large language models and the researchers who make them, as my colleagues and I have frequently pointed out. 

The latest sign of the finance industry’s infatuation with LLMs: Big banks, known to be among the stingiest software buyers, also are increasingly embracing the technology. Citibank, JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs have each ramped up their usage of Microsoft’s AI products during the second half of the year, according to people with knowledge of their purchases. Those products include OpenAI-powered Copilots (which automatically summarize documents and emails, spin up spreadsheets or Powerpoint presentations, and write code), and specialized servers the banks rent to develop their own customized AI models, these people said.