Being an Investor Relations professional is a unique territory. Part sales, part marketing, part finance, part conference organizer, and part relationship manager, IR professionals play a critical role in ensuring their organization’s story is connecting with the right audiences across the capital markets.
When IR is functioning effectively, a company is more likely to attract new high-quality investors, drive transparency, build trust with shareholders, and protect the time of the C-suite.
What makes IR unique, however, is also what makes it challenging. Most IR teams are small and have more things to accomplish than they have available hours.
Banks can fail within a matter of days, activists are increasingly targeting corporate boards, and entire industries seem to be upended overnight. Yet, the tools available to IR professionals to do their jobs effectively are not keeping pace with the speed at which this change is happening. Until now.
Taking IR Beyond Just AI
Since the recent proliferation of Chat GPT and other groundbreaking Generative AI tools, there’s been much discussion in IR about how this technology could transform the industry in ways that have been decades in the making.
Understanding and synthesizing investor event transcripts, one-click reporting, and chatbots that can answer complex investor questions have all been brought into the discussion to address the laborious tasks or inefficiencies that have weighed IR down for years. These, however, are all 1st level applications of AI and Natural Language. While they will no doubt be useful, we believe that, on their own, such applications are not going to be the AI multiplier IR ultimately needs.
We at Q4 believe AI will become ubiquitous and just part of how IR does its job. The technology itself will be a commodity, so the question becomes: “How do you get an edge where everyone is using similar AI models to do similar things?”.
The real value of AI will come from its ability to help IR accomplish specific goals in a personalized way with greater certainty, precision, and speed. All of this will be enabled through proprietary data derived from their individual IR programs paired with capital markets data.
This ability to provide truly unique intelligence will, over time, become the AI multiplier effect Q4 knows the industry needs.
The AI Multiplier Effect
At Q4, we are building first-of-its-kind augmented intelligence for IR, powered by public capital markets data, proprietary engagement data from millions of investor interactions, and data from individual IR programs.
We believe the future of AI in IR is about the data that feeds the machine, and we are readying the only end-to-end IR platform in the market to leverage all that AI can offer across every aspect of an IR program to uniquely accomplish an IR team’s objectives.
Imagine being supported by an always-on, intelligent partner who understands the specifics of your business objectives, the investors you last connected with, what is being viewed on your website, and how millions of investors are evaluating your company through the content they consume. Being able to quickly ingest, synthesize, and make sense of these previously unconnected data sources will be the key to unlocking smarter, faster, and more impactful next steps to drive your program to success.
These will be the capabilities that create the true multiplier for IR and immediately expand the function’s impact without needing to expand their team.
While none of us can anticipate all of the future possibilities deriving from AI, we at Q4 are already building it into our platform with a very specific lens; “How might we pair the proprietary data Q4 uniquely has at its disposal with of our client’s unique program goals to create something revolutionary that will scale their team, accelerate decision making, and free them from resource constraints through augmented intelligence.
We’re excited to show you what’s coming!
* This article was written by Aubrey Chapnick, with input from Q4’s CEO Darrell Heaps, CTO, Warren Faleiro and Head of Product, Dror Nadler
