For 26 years, Morgan Stanley’s Tech Week has brought entrepreneurs, technologists and investors together with the firm’s leaders in Silicon Valley. Designed by Morgan Stanley’s Firmwide Innovation team, the event gathers founders of private companies, leaders from the largest tech companies by market cap and Morgan Stanley’s executives to share expertise and explore how emerging technologies may change the way business is done.
Inside Tech Week 2026: Partnering Early With the Companies Building What's Next
Oct 26, 2026
At Tech Week, Morgan Stanley's senior leaders meet directly with founders, investors and technology partners to engage early with the shifts reshaping financial services and to begin relationships that grow across the integrated firm.
Key Takeaways
- Tech Week brings together founders, technologists and Morgan Stanley leaders to explore emerging technologies and what it will take to deploy them at enterprise scale.
- AI governance, identity and accountability emerged as some of the most pressing questions facing enterprises at this year’s event.
- Organizations are increasingly exploring combinations of frontier, open and specialized AI models while maintaining ownership of their data, expertise and workflows.
- Digital twins and AI-powered coaching tools are creating new ways to scale expertise and institutional knowledge across large organizations.
- Business context and decision-making processes are becoming critical inputs for enterprise AI, helping organizations create differentiated capabilities.
Tech Week is designed for our senior leaders to test their assumptions and build conviction around the technology shifts that are impacting our industry today. We hear directly from the founders building the future, and it helps us understand which shifts we need to lead through in the coming years.
Head of Firmwide Innovation Strategy and Market Innovation
Engaging Disruption Early
The firm evaluates more than 1,000 private technology companies each year for potential partnerships, and Tech Week brings that work into one place. This year’s discussions, which brought together more than 100 startups and established companies and more than 130 Morgan Stanley executives, examined the technology shifts redefining how companies operate, from the infrastructure, data and models powering enterprise AI to the growing role of autonomous agents in software development, employee experience and client engagement. Sessions also explored the evolution of digital assets and markets, alongside the governance, security and resilience needed to deploy these technologies responsibly and at scale.
Mike Pizzi, Global Head of Technology & Operations, said several of those conversations changed how he thinks about the direction of software. One strategic partner described building software whose primary users will be AI agents. Another presented a search engine designed for agents, built around how they will use the web.
We've seen several firms this week really advancing the ability to control agents and the ability to get high-performance systems with a very high degree of accuracy. It's quite clear that this technology has arrived and advanced quite a lot in the past year. Our teams need to take that back and look at how we employ it to drive our strategy forward.
Global Head of Technology & Operations
Mandell Crawley, Chief Client Officer, connected the week's agenda to the changes already underway across financial services. Lines are blurring between public and private markets, institutional investors and complex multigenerational families, and traditional and digital finance. Against that backdrop, he said, the firm has a clear view of what will matter most.
It is very clear to us that the future battleground is one of scaled intelligence, of optimized workflows that are well orchestrated. We know that the future battleground will include programmable assets. And what must always be true when you're running a large-scale, regulated institution like Morgan Stanley, with 91 years of history, is that you've got to have infrastructure that has incredible resiliency around it.
Chief Client Officer and Head of Integrated Firm
Engaging with innovative technology companies early also gives the firm time to act. Concepts that surface at Tech Week can move into Morgan Stanley's innovation labs, where they are evaluated for viability, pressure-tested against the firm's controls and matched to the use cases with the most potential.
Innovation Awards: From First Meeting to Long-Term Partner
Each year, Firmwide Innovation presents its Innovation Awards to technology partners whose work with Morgan Stanley has helped solve critical business challenges, strengthen capabilities and accelerate innovation. Many of the relationships that begin at Tech Week evolve into long-term partnerships. . This year's award recipients reflect the breadth of opportunities being explored across the firm, from creating a more connected view of clients and prospects, to modernizing identity and access management, to strengthening software supply chain security in an increasingly AI-driven world.
Meet Our Innovation Award Winners
Hear directly from this year's Innovation Award winners about their work with Morgan Stanley.
An Integrated Firm, From the Start (Concept)
Many of Morgan Stanley's technology relationships begin with the firm as a client, adopting a company's product to solve a problem in technology or operations. That first relationship gives Morgan Stanley an early view of a company's leadership, its technology and outlook. As the company grows, the firm can support across each stage of its journey. The technology Investment Banking team can help raise capital and navigate strategic decisions. Morgan Stanley at Work can manage employee equity plans. Wealth Management can serve founders and employees as their financial needs change.
Crawley described the relationship as one the firm works to earn over time. "As you grow and evolve on your own journey, we like to earn the right to be your partner of choice," he told founders at the awards dinner, "whether that's raising capital or navigating the strategic inflection points you face."
Brewer said the integrated firm also strengthens Morgan Stanley’s innovation work, because the businesses that serve founders surface potential partnerships with new companies. "What's unique about Morgan Stanley around innovation is that in addition to our team that's out in market, finding the technology companies that can bring innovation into the firm, we also have a leading technology investment banking franchise, a Wealth Management business focused on founders and a Morgan Stanley at Work business focused on private market companies. That creates an incredible pipeline of innovation and tech founders coming through the door," Brewer said.
Tech Week reflects that approach in its attendees. Technologists, bankers and wealth leaders sit in the same sessions and meet the same founders, so a company that first works with the firm as a technology provider is already known to the teams that may serve it later. "What started 26 years ago as a small group of technology leadership coming out to the Valley to learn about innovation has turned into a marquee event. This is truly an event of the integrated firm," –Pizzi said.
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Join Our Innovation Ecosystem
Morgan Stanley collaborates with technology companies ranging from emerging startups to global industry leaders. If you're building capabilities that can create value for our clients, employees or business, we'd like to hear from you.
