AI forays are more obvious in IR functions than any other fund team, not that it has helped all of their outreach tools to communicate with each other.
IR’s hunger for AI has been duly noted: 42% of firms use it as part of their daily workflows. This is in stark contrast to the year prior, where only 6% saw it as essential. This is one of the most baffling one-year changes Irwin’s State of Investor Relations reports has seen.
It is being used wisely as a helper for the irreplaceable ‘human’ side that define performant IR teams, augmenting the way they prepare for meetings or simplifying how to build reports.
This relieving of long-winded administrative burdens is something many fund managers will be familiar with, and agree with. The trouble is that AI tools are never magic tricks able to overturn an IRs’ operations. There is an existing (legacy) marketing, distribution and relationship management ecosystem in place which AI should fit snugly into.
Largely, this does not happen easily or overnight. Funds can then find themselves in a post-deployment troubleshooting mess.
The report goes on to outline the perilous waters of AI adoption, despite the technology’s popularity:
- 73% of surveyed teams note integration challenges between all their tools.
- A mere 27% are satisfied with their data flows between such systems.
Every new gizmo added to a tech stack can lead to inefficiency. If a firm lays yet another specific AI add-on into a CRM, email marketing platform, website or datacentre without the same investor data being shared across it all, high-value allocators may see inconsistent, duplicate or conflicting materials and outreach.
Not to mention compliance gaps between what a marketer may send a prospect and what an IR discloses. When regulations get crossed, it’s a danger-zone.
In that case, the story for 2026 is to create a better-connected operational powerhouse for hedge funds and asset managers to reduce this fragmentation. This involves auditing the quality of investor and prospect data and seeing how it is shared between your existing tech stack.
With 73% integration friction being a proven IR-team industry norm, exceeding this is a reachable milestone that can have drastic effects on productivity, and resulting AuM, too.
