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Matt Levine from Bloomberg covers how JP Morgan has brought Alexa to its trading floors to take on some of the more mundane and administrative drudge work, hopefully freeing up salestraders for more meaningful connections and important tasks.
Of course they're not. The positive spin here is not that salespeople will be replaced by virtual assistants, but that those virtual assistants will take on some of the salespeople's dumber and more administrative tasks, letting the salespeople focus on more important things, like deep meaningful conversations with clients or golf games or targeting exercises. Still there is some value to the dumb stuff too. It gives you a client contact, an excuse to talk to the client, a reason for the client to think fondly of you. If a client emails you to ask for your firm's Apple price target, you can also send her the latest research and suggest a derivatives trade that will pay off handsomely if Apple reaches that target. Alternatively, you can just quickly reply with the price target, and the client will be so grateful to you for not constantly pestering her with dumb ideas for derivatives trades that she will move more business to your bank. As a human, you can make a judgment about which approach will work better.
