From Dashboards to Dialogue: Finance Apps Inside ChatGPT

OpenAI's latest update, allowing apps to run inside ChatGPT, marks a major shift in how professionals interact with software. Instead of jumping between tools, users can now access services directly within ChatGPT. This change could reshape how finance teams work with research, models, and workflows. The Verge explains the update here.

For investment teams, this means analysts and portfolio managers will expect systems that meet them where they already work, delivering instant, context-aware insights. Firms that prepare their data architecture now will be positioned to integrate seamlessly into these conversational environments as they mature.

This is exactly what our product, Basis, enables. The Basis Engine helps financial firms become AI-ready by classifying, tagging, and enriching research, models, and communications to power intelligent workflows anywhere. For example, an analyst could ask ChatGPT: "Run the Thesis Stress Test agent in Basis for Nvidia and summarize recent signals that support or contradict our position." ChatGPT would then securely query Basis, analyze internal and external data, and return a concise summary with links to source notes in the firm's research hub.

The frontier for financial research is moving from dashboards to dialogue. The firms preparing their data for this shift will lead it.

~Ryan Erickson, Founding Executive

TLDR: What you need to know about AI in Finance

Santander partners with OpenAI to accelerate its AI-first strategy — Santander announced a new collaboration with OpenAI to embed generative AI across its operations, aiming to become an AI-native bank and streamline internal research, risk, and client services.

London Stock Exchange Group and Microsoft to enable AI agent development on financial data — LSEG will allow customers to build AI agents using its proprietary data via Microsoft’s Copilot Studio, creating new possibilities for analytics, research automation, and decision support.

TS Imagine and Gentek.ai team up to deliver agentic workflows for global institutions — TS Imagine is integrating Gentek.ai’s infrastructure to bring autonomous, agent-driven automation to trading, risk, and portfolio management across more than 500 institutional clients.

Basis Chat: Your Data + ChatGPT + Built-In Tools

While it's exciting to see how Basis can bring your internal data directly into ChatGPT, it's important to note that access to external tools and datasets will still depend on the vendors behind those integrations. In ChatGPT, some data sources or functions may be limited or unavailable. Within our own platform, however, we can fully harness the power of everything inside the environment by connecting APIs, proprietary data, and internal workflows seamlessly.

In the example above, we're using the OpenAI API alongside an earnings call data source to generate instant summaries of company results. That same framework can be applied to internal earnings notes, portfolio models, or research commentary inside Basis, allowing teams to query and analyze their data with the same level of intelligence.

About Shift
Investment research shouldn't be this hard. Shift turns your firm's scattered knowledge into powerful insights with AI built for how you actually work. We're a team of builders and finance experts based in Charlottesville, VA.