TD Securities, the equity and securities trading arm of TD Bank, rolled out its TD AI Virtual Assistant on July 8, aimed toward its front office institutional sales, trading and research professionals to help them manage their workflow. TD Securities CIO Dan Bosman told that the virtual assistant’s primary goal is to help front-office equity sales and traders gain client insights and research. Bosman noted that being around a trading floor means being exposed to a lot of the lingo, and the context in which users ask some questions feels very unique. So the AI assistant has to sound natural, intuitive and access the insights generated by traders. Bosman said the idea for the AI assistant came from a member of the equity sales team. Fortunately, the bank has a platform called TD Invent, where employees can bring ideas and the innovation leadership team can evaluate projects responsibly. TD Security built the TD AI virtual assistant by leveraging OpenAI’s GPT models. Bosman said TD worked with its technology teams and the Canadian AI company Layer 6, which the bank acquired in 2018, as well as with other strategic partnerships. The assistant integrates with the bank’s cloud infrastructure, allowing it to access internal research documents and market data, such as 13F filings and historical equity data. Bosman calls TDS AI a Knowledge Management System, a term that generally encompasses its ability to retrieve, through retrieval augmented generation (RAG) processes, aggregate and synthesize information into “concise context-aware summaries and insights” so its sales teams can answer client questions. TD AI virtual assistant also gives users access to TD Bank’s foundation model, TD AI Prism. TD AI Prism will improve the predictive performance of TD Bank’s applications by processing 100 times more data, replacing its single-architecture models and ensuring customer data stays internal. One of the standout features is its text-to-SQL capability, which converts natural language prompts into SQL queries.