"We are so behind" is not something you hear often from a distribution leader at a firm managing...

“We are so behind” is not something you hear often from a distribution leader at a firm managing hundreds of billions in AUM.

But Barbara Borozan said it without hesitation. And then she said something that actually stuck with me:

“The most advanced technology we have for prospecting, you’re going to love this, is we use mail merge.”

This is a firm that has the resources. They have Salesforce, SharePoint, Power BI, Snowflake. The primitives are there. The problem is that none of them talk to each other in any meaningful way.

Barbara’s actual vision was simple: show me every Morgan Stanley advisor who owns our infrastructure fund, generate personalized emails, send them out. That’s it. That’s the dream.

The blocker isn’t ambition. It isn’t budget. It’s that the data layer underneath the sales motion is too fragmented to automate anything. Merged entities (Oaktree, Pine Grove, Brookfield proper) that can’t be seen in the same view. Emails logged manually, one by one.

She put it better than I could: “It’s fake AI. There is no agentic action here. This is all still people.”

That’s the gap we exist to close. This is fun.