The Bloomberg Terminal gets an AI makeover, like it or not

Photograph: Anatoliy Zhdanov/AP Images

Bloomberg is testing ASKB (pronounced “ask-bee”), a chatbot-style interface built on multiple language models, to reinvent how finance professionals interact with the Terminal. According to Shawn Edwards, Bloomberg's CTO, the volume and variety of data —from prices and earnings to shipping logs and spending patterns— have made it increasingly difficult to find valuable insights: “It has become unsustainable. Things slip through, or it takes too long.”

ASKB aims to let users ask strategic questions in natural language (“How will the war in Iran and a change in oil affect my portfolio?”) and receive summaries, bullish/bearish scenarios, and automated workflows that can be scheduled or triggered by market conditions. Bloomberg presents the system as “agentic AI”: not just a chat, but templates and automations that replicate preparatory work (for example, for earnings seasons) and save time on routine tasks.

The ASKB beta is open to roughly one-third of the Terminal's 375,000 users; there is no general release date. Bloomberg emphasizes caution around hallucinations: it has built validation checks, semantic controls, and citation checking, and keeps transparency so responses point to original sources. Edwards stresses that Bloomberg does not give buy/sell signals and that the tools do not turn a mediocre analyst into an excellent one —the advantage remains the quality of human ideas.

For many users, ASKB is expected to become the primary way to interact with the Terminal, although graphical interfaces will remain for one-off actions. The arrival of this AI raises questions about training junior analysts and how financial research work will be produced.

Source: The Bloomberg Terminal Is Getting an AI Makeover, Like It or Not — WIRED