A $500 billion money manager has built an Amazon Alexa for Wall Street - and it's already helping trade billions of dollars

• Meet Abbie, AB's artificial intelligence-powered bot that's helping conduct fixed income trades at the $500 billion money manager.
• Abbie, which is like Amazon's Alexa but for Wall Street, is today used to complete mundane and repetitive tasks that might otherwise fall on junior level employees.
• The ultimately goal for Abbie is to negotiate million dollar trades with other financial firms.

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"She always beats me into the office."

Gavin Romm, a portfolio manager at financial giant AB, isn't talking about a senior executive at the firm or the new summer intern. He's talking about Abbie, the 12-week-old AI-powered personal assistant that is quickly taking over fixed income trading at the $500 billion money manager.

Abbie is a virtual assistant used by portfolio managers and traders at the firm. Once an investment decision is made, it can take up to 30 minutes for a junior level employee to translate a portfolio manager's instructions into an actual order on a trading system, according to Romm. Abbie does this in seconds, because it doesn't require a human to manually input the instructions. This frees up workers to focus on more sophisticated tasks.

"The associate portfolio manager saves the time of manually building the trade and focuses all their time instead on reviewing the trade and making sure it meets client portfolio guidelines via our pre-trade compliance system," Romm said. "And the portfolio manager and trader get their trades to the desk much faster."

Romm started building the tool alongside credit trading executive Tim Morbelli and a five person development team four months ago. Morbelli was among the Wall Streeters named to Business Insider's rising stars list.

Already, Abbie is used globally and processes 30%-45% of all fixed-income trades at AB, according to Morbelli. She has already been involved in over 9,000 trade allocations, totaling $18.5 billion in value.

The benefits of AI have long been touted on Wall Street. A recent report from consulting firm Autonomous NEXT found 2.5 million financial-services employees in the US are exposed to AI technology in the front, middle, and back office. Across Wall Street, AI could translate into $1 trillion in savings, the research found.

As for Abbie, Romm and Morbelli have high hopes for what she can do. Today, she's taking on mundane and time consuming tasks for traders and portfolio managers. But she may soon have even more responsibilities.

AB is in currently testing whether Abbie can suggest trades based on data and proprietary models she has synthesized from across the firm, Morbelli said.

For example, today, members of AB's quantitative team might share their own ideas with the fundamental team and other desks. Then the traders, using all of this information, will make a final decision on what investment to make.

In the future, Abbie could automate this entire process. Since she is already tapped into the data across different teams, she can "take a mosaic of the best information and put it all together," to then suggest trade ideas, according to Morbelli.

"Abbie will provide a menu of choices, then we will be able to debate those choices, instead of creating the menu and then debating the menu," Morbelli said.

But that's only one part of AB's hope for Abbie. One day, Abbie might be able to talk to other bots across Wall Street to negotiate and execute bond trades worth millions. Humans won't be totally replaced, as they'll still be needed to create and maintain the algorithms that allow Abbie to operate.

Morbelli said that AB is in talks with a Wall Street bank to do this, but declined to give specifics.

"Abbie's our best friend," Romm joked.