Morgan Stanley to Allow External AI Agents Access to ShareWorks and Equity Edge Platforms

Morgan Stanley will open its ShareWorks and Equity Edge stock administration platforms to external artificial intelligence agents from corporate clients. CNBC reported the move as one of the earliest instances of a major Wall Street bank opening its platforms to external AI tools.

Mark Mitchell, chief product officer of Morgan Stanley at Work, said corporate clients will interact with the platforms through agentic AI-powered tools on their desktops rather than logging in directly.

"The way we see it, in a future state, our corporate clients will not be logging into ShareWorks or Equity Edge," Mitchell said. " The bank has already granted a handful of clients early agentic access. Mitchell said Morgan Stanley plans to open agentic access to its 3,400 administration clients by next year.

2 trillion in assets gathered to its workplace strategy in April. 35 trillion in client assets. The firm acquired Solium Capital in 2019 and E-Trade in 2020, building a stock plan administration business that caters to almost half of the companies in the S&P 500 and eight of the 10 biggest unicorn startups.

Mitchell said fast-growing technology and biotech companies want to administer increasingly complex stock plans without adding headcount in support roles like human resources. He said AI agents can handle aspects of the job without adding human employees. Mitchell said agentic AI would allow Morgan Stanley to scale services without adding "thousands and thousands" of employees.

Morgan Stanley is using the Model Context Protocol, an open source standard that allows AI models to plug into data sources. The firm began partnering with OpenAI in 2022. " JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs are using AI agents internally for tasks such as writing code.

CNBC reported that the two firms have yet to publicly announce steps to allow external agents to connect directly to their firms' systems.