Wells Fargo AI chief: AI Teammate cuts meeting prep to prompts

Mansour joined Wells Fargo's wealth and investment management arm six months ago as head of artificial intelligence, arriving from Google, and he spent his early days at the bank playing a big role in launching AI Teammate. That background matters to how he frames the tool: 20 years ago he sat across from clients as a financial adviser, and he says he used that experience to shape AI Teammate into something every adviser and client associate across his unit can use.

The mechanics he describes are deliberately unglamorous. AI Teammate is what he calls a model harness, sitting on top of Advisor Gateway, a single platform with over 200 tools that advisers use daily. Rather than clicking through a number of different applications, advisers use a conversational window agent to reach outcomes faster. The example he gives is meeting preparation: pulling investment research together with client relationship management notes and to-do items into an agenda, which he says used to take multiple hours and now takes a couple of prompts.

Mansour also draws a contrast with his former employer. He says the intent and level of enthusiasm at Wells are the same as at Google, but the aim, outcomes, regulatory regimes and clients are different, and that the bank intends to move with extreme speed but never at the risk of safety. Underlying the whole effort, he points to a wealth transfer on the horizon to millennials and Gen Z, which he says creates two distinct sets of demand: clients who want to interact only digitally, and clients who will use their own agents while still keeping a financial adviser as a layer of approval.