AI for IR: From implementation to Execution
By Steven Rubis
Panelists:
Jordan Fisher, Vice President Business Development, AlphaSense, Inc.
Jay Krish, Head of Digital Transformation, Enterprise Architecture, and Global Innovation Digital Partner, Ingredion Incorporated
Tim Stahl, Chief Revenue Officer, Q4, Inc.
Noah Weiss, Vice President Investor Relations and Communications, Ingredion Inc.
Chris Weltzer, Partner, Portfolio Manager, Balyasny Asset Management, L.P.
Moderator: Elizabeth Saha, Senior Investor Relations Lead, Littlefuse, Inc.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- Artificial Intelligence (AI) represents a core technology at the forefront these days, regardless of your industry or background. Enterprising investor relations officers (IROs) are constantly seeking new methods to make their lives and their executives’ lives simpler and more efficient. As a result, many IROs are already turning to AI to make the development of key deliverables easier.
- Jay Krish and Noah Weiss of Ingredion opened the panel by discussing how to prepare your company for AI and obtain management buy-in. Concerns include protecting non-public information and ensuring the proper safeguards are in place for both the company and end users. Ingredion began its AI journey in 2019 and is now focused on education and improving employee engagement with AI. “Using AI represents art, not science,” Krish said. “Learning to use AI revolves around learning to ask good questions that help return high-quality answers.” Weiss added, “Leveraging AI is about working together to improve prompts.” The Ingredion team advised starting with small tasks and then, make progress on items that can be iterated incrementally.
- Tim Stahl of Q4 discussed how AI can be used to write an earnings call script. He advised IROs to make sure that your company either “makes everyone an AI expert, or hires the appropriate AI experts to be successful.”
- Jordan Fisher of AlphaSense discussed data sets that IROs and investors can use on a daily basis. “The longer you wait to adopt AI, the further behind the curve you become,” he said. AI should improve speed rather than create an entirely new process for a given company.
- Chris Weltzer of Balyasny discussed how the buy-side is leveraging AI to optimize its workflows. “If you can illustrate an efficiency gain or profit improvement with an AI use case, it goes a long way to driving adoption.” In the day-to-day workflows at Balyasny, AI is optimizing and improving efficiency in three ways: First, AI provides efficiency gains on simple tasks and procedures that can be automated to save time and money. Second, AI can effectively summarize communications, creating time to do more value-add tasks throughout the day. Third, Balyasny uses AI as a “junior analyst” to accomplish time-consuming, simple research tasks that might take a human 40 to 60 hours to complete. In any event, AI is becoming more entrenched in both corporations and on the buy-side, and the panelists expect it to continue this trend as these entities find ways to drive time and monetary efficiencies through AI.