The Bloomberg Terminal Is Getting an AI Makeover

Source: Slashdot

Bloomberg Terminal’s Growing Complexity

For its famous intractability, the Bloomberg Terminal has long inspired devotion, bordering on obsession. Among traders, the ability to chart a path through the software’s dizzying scrolls of numbers and text to isolate far‑flung information is the mark of a seasoned professional. But as a greater mass of data is fed into the Terminal—earnings, asset prices, weather forecasts, shipping logs, factory locations, consumer‑spending patterns, private loans, and more—valuable information is being lost.

“It has become more and more untenable,” says Shawn Edwards, chief technology officer at Bloomberg. “You miss things, or it takes too long.”

ASKB: A Chatbot‑Style Interface

To remedy the problem, Bloomberg is testing a chatbot‑style interface for the Terminal, ASKB (pronounced “ask‑bee”), built atop a basket of different language models. The broad idea is to help finance professionals condense labor‑intensive tasks and make it possible to test abstract investment theses against the data through natural‑language prompts.

As of publication, the ASKB beta is open to roughly a third of the software’s 375,000 users; Bloomberg has not specified a date for a full release. Wired spoke with Edwards at Bloomberg’s London headquarters in early April, where he shared several examples of what ASKB can do:

“With ASKB, I can create workflow templates. I can write a long query, and say, ‘Hey, here’s all the data I’m going to need. Give me a synopsis of the bull and bear cases, what the Street is saying, what the guidance is.’ Now, I want to schedule [the workflows] or trigger them when I see this or that condition in the world.”

Implications for Traders

Edwards emphasized that the tool does not magically turn an average employee into a great one. The differentiator remains the trader’s ideas:

“These tools are not magical. They don’t make an average employee all of a sudden great. The difference will be your ideas. In the hands of experts, it allows them to do better analysis, deeper research—to sift through 10 great ideas when they might have only had time for one. If you’re a mediocre analyst, they’ll be 10 mediocre ideas.”