WIRED spoke with Bloomberg’s chief technology officer about the big, chatbot-style changes coming to the iconic platform for traders.The Bloomberg Terminal, renowned for its complexity, has long been a symbol of prestige among traders. The ability to navigate through its labyrinth of numbers and text to extract valuable information is considered a hallmark of an experienced professional. However, as the Terminal is increasingly inundated with not just earnings and asset prices, but also weather forecasts, shipping logs, factory locations, consumer spending patterns, private loans, and more, valuable information is getting lost. Shawn Edwards, Bloomberg’s chief technology officer, acknowledges this issue, stating, “It has become more and more untenable. You miss things, or it takes too long.”
To address this, Bloomberg is experimenting with a chatbot-style interface for the Terminal, known as ASKB (pronounced ask-bee). This interface is built on a variety of language models and aims to assist finance professionals in streamlining labor-intensive tasks. It also enables testing of abstract investment theories against the data through natural language prompts. At the time of reporting, the ASKB beta is accessible to approximately a third of the software’s 375,000 users, with no specified date for a full release.
In a conversation with WIRED at Bloomberg’s London headquarters, Edwards discussed the motivation behind the Terminal’s revamp, potential resistance from traditionalists, and Bloomberg’s efforts to eliminate glitches. He explained that the primary goal of the generative AI is to help users find key insights and form a comprehensive view of the world around a specific idea. He also emphasized that while ASKB can help surface untapped data, it doesn’t guarantee success. The difference, he says, will still be the quality of the ideas. In the hands of experts, it allows for better analysis and deeper research. However, for a mediocre analyst, the result will still be mediocre ideas. Despite being marketed as a form of agentic AI, ASKB appears more like a chatbot designed for improved SEO.