UBS is using AI to create avatar videos from analysts’ notes.
36 analysts covering a range of sectors are taking part in the Swiss bank’s initiative.
UBS told Business Insider that clients have been seeking more video options.
Banks are using AI to save their analysts’ time while giving clients what they want.
Bank of America uses “Banker Assist” to aggregate information to offer insights unique to each client, while Goldman Sachs has a “GS AI Assistant” that functions as an in-house ChatGPT for staff.
Swiss bank UBS has gone further, using AI to generate avatars of analysts that explain their research to clients, and it’s planning to do this more.
The Swiss bank started using AI avatars of some analysts in January. About 36 UBS analysts, or 5% of its total, have volunteered to take part. They cover sectors including technology, consumer goods, and energy.
UBS’s use of AI avatars was first reported by The Financial Times.
Using OpenAI and Synthesia tools, a script is generated in a matter of seconds that is then edited by staff.
Scott Solomon, head of global research technology at UBS, told Business Insider that his team started creating videos of analysts a decade ago, but capacity restrictions meant they were capped at about 1,000 annually.
Analysts were writing an average of two notes a week but would only go to the video studio once a quarter, he said.
The new tools are “enabling somebody to use a capability in video that they weren’t really able to use before,” he said.
It also gives clients another way to digest information and meet their rising demand for video, Solomon said.
He compared an avatar to other parts of an analyst’s toolkit. “When an analyst joins UBS, we give them Excel, we give them our authoring platform, we give them a CRM [customer relationship management] tool so they can talk to clients. I want them to have an avatar,” he said.
Solomon said the next step would be integrating the technology so that a video can eventually be created when an analyst publishes a note — without the need for editing.
He said he hoped this would become possible by the end of the year.
Even if the process was fully automated, UBS said analysts will still assess a video based on their notes before it is sent to clients.
Solomon said that ideally, the avatars would eventually become part of the onboarding process, so that whenever a note is published, there’s a video too.
The next step would be integrating this capability directly into the authoring platform.
“We have the script generator, we have the ability to send the script to generate the avatar, and then we obviously have the ability to deliver the avatar to clients,” Solomon said.
“We want to string all that together so that as they’re writing the note, they can get the video with it as well. Our goal is absolutely not to do 50,000 videos a year, but clearly there’s an opportunity to do more videos than we are today.”
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