- AI tools help companies understand patterns in market data and prepare earnings reports.
- One CEO advises companies to develop clear corporate AI policies and evaluate AI tools from a security perspective.
- This article is “CXO AI Playbook“Business leaders speak openly about how they're testing and using AI.”
For public companies, investor relations involves a lot of time-consuming administrative tasks that must be performed, typically on a quarterly basis, from analyzing data to producing reports and communicating with shareholders.
“It's really a three-month job that's repeated four times a year,” said Darrell Heaps, founder and CEO of Toronto-based artificial intelligence-driven investor relations platform Q4, which was founded in 2006 and works with about 2,500 companies worldwide.
Many companies are turning to AI systems to streamline investor relations tasks, and Heaps said automating parts of the process with AI can “save a huge number of days a quarter,” freeing up time for the team to engage and build relationships with investors.
Business Insider spoke with Heaps about how these executives can leverage AI and how the technology can humanize their roles.
The following has been edited for clarity and length.
How can organizations use AI to streamline investor relations?
In traditional data analytics, AI helps make sense of large-scale data patterns in the market, helping executive investor relations teams understand the right investors to go after.
With the rise of generative AI, sentiment analysis and summarizing peer press releases and transcripts are some of the key use cases we're seeing. Part of IR's role is to understand what's going on in your industry, what's going on with your peers, and how analysts view your competitors. AI is great at summarizing and analyzing a lot of that content.
These tools also bring great efficiency to the creation of earnings reports and press releases.
How can AI benefit investor relations teams?
This creates huge efficiencies in terms of time saved, allowing you to execute more strategically and ultimately deliver more value.
By saving time, IR teams can dig deeper into their shareholder base and understand which investors they want to attract. Being more strategic at the investor level is absolutely critical for IR, because the ultimate goal of IR is to outperform your peers.
How do you think AI will impact the human side of IR?
By eliminating administrative tasks, individuals have the time to identify and engage with the investors who will make the biggest difference: relationship building.
AI makes human interaction possible. Without it, IR teams are overwhelmed with administrative tasks and don't have the time to actually drive that engagement. AI is eliminating anything that can be automated. If you can automate it and have a machine do it more efficiently, spend that time cultivating quality relationships that will ultimately have a better impact on your company.
What advice would you give to business executives about incorporating AI into their investor relations programs?
Have consistent company policies on how AI is used and clarity from a security standpoint so that not everyone in the company is acting on their own or doing their own thing. That's the most important thing we've seen in companies.
Evaluate the tools available and see if they can address your niche and what you are looking for. Make sure it is secure.
Be realistic about the areas where AI can improve things. Where will you actually see the biggest impact in terms of time savings? That's the point of zeroing in on specific use cases. If you're not thinking about and focusing your energy on specific use cases that will bring value to your business, you could end up wasting a lot of time and energy.
Recognize that using AI is a fundamental shift in computing — it's not a future story, it's the way things are happening now — and incorporating AI into your IR program will have real, tangible benefits.
