Bloomberg has announced that ASKB, the Bloomberg Terminal’s conversational AI interface, is now generally available to financial professionals. This is the next step in ASKB’s evolution to provide trustworthy answers based on comprehensive, established financial sources: AI built on decades of Bloomberg’s own trusted data, with newly expanded support for clients to enable content from their Instant Bloomberg (IB) chats, Worksheets and files, says the company.
“Every decision made by a financial professional is shaped by more than the market data in front of them. Until now, some of the most valuable information they have, including a trader’s own conversations, a portfolio manager’s watchlist, an analyst’s research, has all lived outside the AI tools they use to make decisions,” said Wayne Barlow, global head of core terminal products at Bloomberg. “Bringing an investor’s unique professional context together with Bloomberg’s market intelligence, in one conversation, is what makes ASKB so powerful.”
Bloomberg clients send roughly 40 million IB chats each day, added Bloomberg. Buried in that volume are some of the freshest, most specific market color and trade ideas a finance professional has access to: their own contacts’ analysis and perspectives on a company, a sector, or a market event. Today, these valuable insights are scattered across a user’s chats and effectively gone by the afternoon.
Now, once enabled, clients can ask ASKB about their own IB chats in plain language and get an answer cited back to the source chat, Bloomberg continued. An analyst or portfolio manager can get a summary of what their contacts said about oil today, catch up on everything that came in overnight, or surface the dissenting view from a bearish contact before making a decision. ASKB can draw on three months of a client’s chat history, tuned for the shorthand and acronyms that make financial services chat hard to search.
Worksheets in ASKB let clients ask questions about the securities already in their coverage lists and watchlists, says Bloomberg. Instead of entering tickers one at a time or rebuilding filters by hand, an analyst can simply ask ASKB for the top performers in a Worksheet, the largest movers, or which firms report earnings this week, and get sourced analysis that draws on ASKB’s existing data, news, and research tools. The lists clients have already built become the starting point for every question, not a separate step before it.
Bloomberg Drive in ASKB gives clients a single place to upload, organize, search, and share their files, from internal research like notes, investment theses, and earnings recaps to the other documents they rely on in their day-to-day workflows. Previously, a file attached in ASKB disappeared once the conversation thread ended. Once enabled, everything in a client’s Bloomberg Drive, including files and folders shared by colleagues, is natively available for questioning in ASKB and remains an available persistent source in future conversations.
Users can ask about a specific file, a whole folder or their entire library and get one answer that draws on their own content alongside Bloomberg’s data, news and research. That opens up a new kind of question, added Bloomberg: not just what happened in the market, but how it compares with what a firm already believes. Every answer cites the file and passage it came from, and those files are not visible to other users unless the user who uploads them chooses to share with colleagues at their firm.
Finding the right answer has traditionally meant knowing which sources to check, gathering the data inside them, and piecing it together by hand, often before a professional even knows which sources matter, Bloomberg continued. ASKB does that in a single conversation, grounded in Bloomberg’s own decades of experience in market data, analytics, and industry partnerships, not a general AI model. Client material remains permissioned and distinct from Bloomberg sources. The result: answers professionals can trust, so they can spend more of their time on the analysis itself, not the search for it.
“ASKB is the most advanced functionality we’ve ever built, and it’s also been our most rapidly adopted. Clients tell us it’s transforming how they work, giving them the ability to analyze markets and information they never could before,” said Shawn Edwards, chief technology officer at Bloomberg. “The feedback we hear most consistently is about trust: our users trust ASKB because it’s built on the sources they already know and use, with every answer containing transparent attribution to exactly where it came from. This isn’t Bloomberg building on AI. It’s AI built on Bloomberg.”
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