Morgan Stanley at Work is building a smarter, more connected, AI-enabled workplace benefits experience. The goal is to reduce friction for employers and employees by making it easier to move from questions to actionable next steps.
The workplace benefits experience should not be fragmented, but for many organizations, it still is. Employees bounce between platforms to access account information, plan details, tax documents, educational resources or guidance for important financial decisions that can have lasting impacts. Employers spend time chasing status updates, reconciling data, and answering the same participant questions. Leaders receive reports, but not always the kind of clarity that drives decisions.
To address this, Morgan Stanley at Work continues to invest in enhancements to reduce friction by advancing our modern workplace benefits experience to help companies and employees get more from a connected AI-enabled ecosystem across equity compensation, retirement, deferred compensation, executive services, saving and giving, and financial wellness.
Scott Whatley, Head of Morgan Stanley at Work, and Mark Mitchell, Chief Product Officer of Morgan Stanley at Work, share how Morgan Stanley at Work is evolving the workplace benefits experience through an AI-enabled ecosystem.
What are companies expecting from their workplace benefits provider today?
Companies are looking for outcomes, not complexity. They want less friction, faster answers, and stronger confidence for employees and executives, without having to navigate what is happening behind the scenes. At the same time, expectations are rising because the way people interact with software is changing. Instead of clicking through screens, exporting files, and reconciling manually, the experience is moving toward a model where you can ask a question in plain language and get a clear, actionable answer.
How is technology shifting experiences, and why does it matter?
For decades, workplace technology has trained all of us to work through interfaces: click, point, fill out forms, and read tables. That is being rewritten in real time. The next generation is built around agents that help users navigate information, automate workflows, and surface relevant insights across connected systems that bring you the answer instead of making you go find it. In practice, that means less time spent running reports and stitching together updates, and more time spent acting on insights, with the platform able to draft, reconcile, and explain within the controls you expect.
What’s live today in Morgan Stanley at Work, and how will AI improve both participant outcomes and employer decision-making?
AI is already improving outcomes in practical, visible ways: service teams are using tools that summarize calls, draft follow-ups, and recommend next-best actions, supported by governed knowledge so responses have human oversight.
Next, those capabilities move closer to the participant through an intelligent, personalized E*TRADE Virtual Assistant that can answer questions like transfer status, wire fees and vesting schedules using the participant’s actual plan data, helping people move from question to action faster.
For employers, they’ll have a trusted source of truth for equity program analytics and insights with WorkplaceIQ. Built on 20+ years of data and business logic, it enables Morgan Stanley at Work to operate on client data in real time and deliver results, making the data layer—not just the user interface—a core source of value. Workplace IQ extends this advantage through one of the largest equity compensation datasets globally, adding the missing layer of context by bringing peer benchmarking and trend insights into the stock plan ecosystem. This helps teams see how they compare by industry, size, and region across measures such as plan participation, enrollment trends, holding patterns, employee engagement, grant practices, and other aggregated program metrics. It also delivers strategic insights into the company’s own plan, helping leadership better understand and optimize programs that often represent millions or even billions of dollars in annual stock-based compensation, while informing compensation, recruiting, and retention decisions. By surfacing key signals and enabling teams to explore the data through the lens of the questions senior management is asking, WorkplaceIQ shifts the experience from static reporting to true decision support, making it easier to evaluate plan health, identify opportunities, and act with confidence.
Where is Morgan Stanley at Work headed?
We are building toward a workplace benefits experience that feels connected, guided, and built for trust, streamlining moments that matter and making it easier to move from information to clear next steps. The direction is an agent-driven model where the interface becomes the conversation and the platform becomes a partner, so teams can stop running reports, exporting files, and reconciling manually and instead ask for what they need and get an answer that is grounded, explained, and actionable. And when the stakes are high, the system is designed to escalate seamlessly to dedicated service teams supporting complex needs that require human intervention and reassurance from a human conversation.
Our north star is simple: make work that used to take three days take 30 seconds, in a way that feels seamless, so people get more clarity, more confidence, and focus on the work where they create the most value.
Key Takeaways
- Workplace benefits experiences are often fragmented, creating lost time and missed opportunities for employees, plan sponsors, and leaders.
- Morgan Stanley at Work is investing in a more connected, lower-friction experience that pairs technology and service, including AI-enabled tools to move users from questions to actionable answers faster.
- The experience shift is toward agent-like, plain-language interactions and decision support—improving participant self-service (e.g., plan-specific questions) and giving employers more context and insight (e.g., benchmarking and trends) to act with confidence.
