By Lindsay James |
The financial services industry has spent two years exploring generative AI in regulated workflows. For Nej D’Jelal, group head of workflows, data and analytics at LSEG, that journey is now entering a new phase.
“At first, firms focused on experimentation: identifying use cases, establishing governance and building the technology stack required to make AI useful,” he says. “That meant ensuring consistent access to data and systems capable of answering questions in ways that made sense to end users. There was also an element of fear of missing out as organisations sought to understand industry developments.”
But over the past 12 months, and particularly the last six, D’Jelal has seen real conviction and transition from that experimentation into adoption. “Workspace AI Search now has 17,000 active users and Deep Research has reached 7,000 users, with adoption quadrupling since Q1,” he says.
For financial professionals, that trust is critical. “They make trading and investment decisions,” D’Jelal says. “There’s a real downside to making the wrong decision.”
Generative and agentic systems are powerful because they can interpret a question asked in plain English, understand its intent and map it to a broad range of data and capabilities. Yet their probabilistic nature means they cannot provide certainty alone.
LSEG addresses that challenge by combining AI’s ability to synthesise information with deterministic tools and trusted and licensed data, including proprietary market data, research, Reuters News, transcripts, filings and events. “The certainty and the proprietary and exclusive nature of the underlying data is so critical to our users,” D’Jelal says.
Transparency is equally important. When LSEG delivers an insight through its user interface, it aims to let customers source the transcript words supporting it. This enables them to validate, share and act on the insight. “Auditability is a critical design principle that we have factored into the way in which we build these products,” D’Jelal says.
That principle is central to LSEG’s Workspace AI Search and Workspace Deep Research.
Workspace AI Search supports everyday financial intelligence across market data, filings, Reuters News and research, while Deep Research tackles more complex questions by coordinating structured and unstructured content, connecting evidence and producing transparent, traceable research outputs.
Behind both solutions are agents that orchestrate questions across LSEG’s data, from macroeconomic information and company estimates to transcripts and filings. Beyond Workspace, those capabilities are increasingly available within Microsoft Teams and other customer workflows, while maintaining the same governance, entitlements and licensing controls.
Looking ahead, D’Jelal sees the industry moving from using AI for a prompt or query, to using it for a job. Where firms once had to choose between a fully loaded terminal or building their own solution on top of raw data, LSEG’s agents now offer a hybrid of the two.
“Firms can build their own agents directly on LSEG’s proprietary and licensed data or draw on LSEG’s pre-built agents,” D’Jelal says. “Our differentiation comes from content, business logic and governance, not simply access to data. It’s a decomposed version of the terminal. We’re bringing together content, business logic and governance in discrete packages that perform specific jobs, drawing on specialist intelligence from Reuters, IFR, LPC, PFI and Deals Intelligence.”
For organisations embarking on their transformation, D’Jelal’s advice is to start with real customer needs and pain points. “AI expands what is possible,” he says. “It allows firms not only to optimise existing workflows, but to reimagine them. However, that transformation must be matched by scale, security and governance, particularly as cyber risk increases.”
For LSEG, the shift is already tangible. “We’re very proud of the fact that we’ve gone through the experimentation phase and now we have products that are being adopted at scale across thousands of users,” D’Jelal says. “We’ve had to break ground and build new capabilities, and that’s something we’re very excited about.”