AI usage among the whole IR function has jumped five-fold in three years. A radical shift, but one prone to security and data privacy concerns.
As we have already seen, Nasdaq’s annual survey into the day-to-day lives of investor relations professionals has seen that 51% have embedded AI into their workflows.
Largely these are to ease high-frequency tasks: summarising transcripts, research and news (81% of AI users), boosting earnings preparations with scripts and Q&A support (70%) and streamlining reports to internal management (36%).
That is all well and good when concentrated on ‘AI for internal use’, yet as soon as AI usage gets open up to investor-facing material, sirens sound. Confidence with the technology is building as AI permeates everyday search, but it is not immediately halting innate distrust.
This distrust is proving to hold IR teams back too, not so much any doubt over its usefulness, limited tools or resources, skepticism over its ROI potential, or limited understanding. Data privacy and security issues are reported by 22% of professionals where AI governance still faces question marks.
So, what does this mean for fund marketers?
AI is used by every point of the investment management ecosystem: at portfolio companies, and by communications functions looking to reach allocators. Institutional investors themselves are deploying AI to transcribe calls, benchmark peer commentaries and query or analyse fund materials to make their decisions.
This is the rub for a hedge fund’s marketing team, as it emphasises the need to make all fund-representative materials clear and consistent for man and machine.
Pitch decks, commentaries and DDQs will now influence an AI tool’s decision-making (potentially before it influences a human’s own), so must answer questions posed by an LP’s analyst or an LLM model they are potentially assisted by.
What is more bearing in mind is, when drafting content using GenAI, plenty of AI governance relies on an IR’s instinct: that it must satisfy a compliance officer the same way that vendor due diligence documentation and human-reviewed feedback loops will.
There is a discipline behind providing evidence for why a fund marketer used and approved an AI’s hand in LP communications. This is something that needs to be ingrained everywhere for AI trust to improve, justified by IR team’s thoughtful use cases.
Source:
Nasdaq, “How IR Teams Are Turning AI Into Strategic Advantage”
