Generative AI comes to Nasdaq, winning over engineers before lawyers

Months into the advent of more powerful artificial intelligence, a split is emerging inside the corporate world: engineers and marketers are embracing it, while lawyers less so, Nasdaq’s chief technology and chief information officer said Tuesday.

Inside Nasdaq, which operates stock exchanges and sells technology for global markets, workers across different departments are exploring how to use more novel AI, Brad Peterson said at the Reuters MOMENTUM conference in Austin.

One unit ran a “hackathon,” or collaborative engineering event, of so-called generative AI, technology that produces text, images or other new content based on past data. The division, Verafin, was exploring how to imbue such AI into its product for fighting financial crime, he said, adding the technology could create investigative reports. Verafin has used AI more generally to spot doctored checks.

“There’s going to be a race on the deepfakes,” Peterson said.

Computer programmers are also looking to AI to suggest code for Nasdaq’s business, Peterson said. Marketers are exploring how ChatGPT-style programs can draft blogs.

On the other hand, lawyers at the company – a group that some more broadly expect to use AI to summarize long documents – are interested but more cautious on the technology, he said.

Nasdaq has taken a permissioning approach to deal with concerns tied to AI, for instance, the risk confidential content fed to it could be accessed by others.

Employees must register to use certain AI tools internally and undertake training before they proceed, Peterson said. The company would not immediately ban tools like others have, he said.

“We’re not going to go dark early,” he said.

Still, despite using other forms of AI for years, Nasdaq’s latest work remains experimental; no code has been published yet drafted by AI, Peterson said. The company’s lawyers are hashing out with vendors who owns the final output, he said.

Nasdaq works primarily with Amazon Web Services, but not exclusively. On rival Microsoft, which is making a big business push through its investment in ChatGPT’s creator OpenAI, Peterson said: “We are absolutely a big user of the whole Office Suite and the corporate email and Teams” — products in which Microsoft is rolling out generative AI features.

Nasdaq has accessed a preview of Amazon’s answer to the generative AI race, namely Amazon Bedrock, a pick-your-preferred technology approach that includes Claude AI from the startup Anthropic. Peterson did not comment on Titan, the family of models Amazon itself created with less fanfare than OpenAI’s.

On the longer-term horizon for Nasdaq is integrating the Thoma Bravo-owned software firm Adenza, subject to closure of the $10.5 billion-deal Nasdaq announced last month. Adenza mostly uses on-premises data centers, meaning Nasdaq would have to help it with cloud migrations, he said.