Blackstone
- Finance firms have tons of data, usually strewn all over the place in different systems.
- That makes enterprise search a challenge for Wall Street firms, but generative AI could help.
- Blackstone's CTO breaks down how the PE giant is using AI to strengthen its internal search.
This story is part of a series highlighting top technology projects on Wall Street.
Wall Street is no stranger to managing and analyzing copious amounts of data. But data is only helpful if you can find it.
That's why investing giant Blackstone has spent the past 10 months building DocAI, a generative AI tool that aims to help workers search and summarize more efficiently.
Doc AI allows workers across Blackstone to upload documents that are relevant to their work. The data collected, which could be anything from proprietary Blackstone information that could drive investment deals to research from consulting firms, will be used to train generative AI models designed to quickly pull tiny nuggets of information or create summaries.
"While it's great that ChatGPT and whatnot allows you to search the broader internet, a lot of times what really matters is asking questions and getting summarizations of very specific topical documentation," like internal deals and macroeconomic research from investment banks, John Stecher, Blackston's chief technology officer, told Business Insider.
Generative AI has a lot of potential to cut costs and drive business on Wall Street, from automating grunt work to feeding investment bankers multi-million dollar deal ideas. But one of the technology's most transformative applications could be improving notoriously thorny issues with search. OpenAI's ChatGPT paved the way, but these general-purpose models, which aren't trained with finance in mind, can fall short when retrieving relevant info for Wall Streeters.
"If you're a deal professional analyzing sector trends, you're a software engineer searching design documents, it's going to save you a significant amount of time, no different than Google does for looking for things online," Stecher said.
Personalization will be key for DocAI, which will roll out as a utility to the whole firm
Some groups at the firm are piloting DocAI, and Blackstone hopes to start making it available to its 5,000-strong workforce in the fall.
Stecher said analysts and vice presidents in real estate and private equity were using DocAI to research potential deals. Legal and compliance teams have used it to keep track of and query different credit covenants and mandates. And thanks to architecture diagrams they've uploaded, software engineers can better understand the connections between different systems.
Each individual person can build their own view of the myriad documents and choose what sort of information they want to prioritize.
"We don't just treat this as, 'dump a bunch of information in,' instead its 'let's make our platform a highly curated set of information that individuals select to upload and view as valuable to Blackstone's operations,'" Stecher said.