87 FINANCIAL SERVICES to trace every data point from source to destination – emerged as a foundational priority from the earliest days of the partnership. “It is not at a table-to-table level, not even column-to-column, but data cell to data cell,” says Byrne. Working in the financial services sector also places uniquely demanding requirements on historical traceability. “It is not enough to know what the right value is – you have to know what your understanding of the historical value was at a given point in time, including when and why any corrections were made,” says Byrne. Esmiley credits LSEG with pushing Microsoft on this explainability. “Our first agent launch would provide an answer, and LSEG said: ‘We need to expose that lineage to the business user’.” Making an agent’s reasoning transparent required significant infrastructure investment. “If the answer is six, the user needs to understand how it arrived at six and what data it relied on,” explains Esmiley. “User disagreement has become a valuable signal in its own right – a powerful feedback loop for LSEG’s engineering roadmap.” The partnership’s most recent milestone is the launch of a model context protocol (MCP) server enabling customers to build AI agents directly on LSEG data. Byrne sees three distinct client archetypes emerging: those who want raw data and nothing else; those who want a fully turnkey AI experience; and a growing middle ground for whom MCP represents an appealing option. “They do not want to build something completely custom from the ground up, but they want to run their own large language model (LLM) and interact with their data in the most seamless way possible,” Byrne says. “I think that hits a real sweet spot.” By both executives’ accounts, this is only the beginning. Byrne and Esmiley acknowledge that the AI phase of their partnership arrived far faster than they anticipated. “We agreed on all this amazing work as part of a 10-year partnership, and then roughly three weeks after the official announcement in December 2022, AI models really started to connect commercially with the market,” says Esmiley. Since then, the relationship has evolved in real time, with both organisations continually rethinking how they collaborate day to day. Yet for Byrne, the pace of change only reinforces how early the industry still is in the journey ahead. “If I were comparing it to the personal computing revolution, we are not even at the Apple II phase yet,” he says. “We are only beginning to see what’s possible. It’s incredibly exciting.” Photo: Unplash/Austin Distel
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