You Can’t Take an AI Assistant Out to Lunch

Listed companies can no longer outsource their investment story to the capital market.

At almost every investor relations conference these days, someone on the stage eventually says that the IR function within a listed company is becoming more ‘strategic’. Everyone nods, including me. But I have often wondered what this really means.

The claim is usually followed by a discussion about IR teams addressing the needs of multiple stakeholders, gaining greater board access, adopting new technology and data tools, responding to ESG and AI, or, more simply, taking on an expanded list of responsibilities.

Each of those contributes meaningfully to the claim, but perhaps the real answer lies elsewhere. The role may be becoming more strategic not because the industry itself has changed, but because the market around it has. And with AI now influencing how investors research and discover investment ideas, companies can no longer assume that the capital market will distribute their story for them as it did in the past.

For decades, public companies could rely on an established network of intermediaries to help them reach investors. Analysts interpreted their results and brokers distributed research and organised meetings. Financial journalists built close relationships with market participants and amplified important stories. Conferences brought companies and capital together. Yes, smaller, less liquid and less fashionable companies have always struggled for attention. But there was one relatively clear route through which information moved from a company to analysts, sales desks and ultimately investors.

Companies today still use all of these channels. The difference is that there are multiple routes to investors and companies can no longer assume that traditional intermediaries will handle distribution across the full addressable investment universe. The old distribution system has become much more selective, and brokers focus their resources where the incentives are strongest, usually around larger, more actively traded companies.

At the same time, the addressable buy-side universe is becoming somewhat broader and more fragmented, with different types of investors following different processes (and, as a result, placing different demands on IR teams). A few examples of this: passive funds may own a significant portion of a company through index inclusion rules rather than a traditional investment decision process, while still exercising influence through voting. Quant funds select companies using alternative data and signals, again, often with limited reliance on the company’s traditional narrative. And the ease of cross-border investing has opened global markets to retail investors, who conduct their own analysis using more sophisticated platforms. ¹

But now there is a new layer in the mix: AI, which promises to make the investment research process faster and more efficient. At least in theory (and increasingly so in practice), investors can summarise filings, compare companies and place new information in context in a few minutes, all before visiting an IR website, speaking to an analyst or meeting management. And, as many of us have already experienced first-hand, once this works well enough, it becomes easy to imagine a world in which investors outsource parts of the stock-picking process and, eventually, more of their independent thinking and reasoning as well.

***

Ten years ago, when we were launching Closir, our first value proposition was corporate access. We organised meetings between listed companies from emerging markets and institutional investors in London.

I particularly remember one call with a fund manager about a Turkish company whose management was passing through town. It had not been easy to get him on the phone. When we finally spoke, he explained that he held more than 750 company meetings every year and received perhaps four times as many requests.

He turned to his Bloomberg screen, looked up the ticker and asked, “What is special about this company?” I was lost. Should I have given him a pitch? I didn’t know how. I didn’t have all the facts. But I knew that whatever I said in the next 15 seconds would determine whether the meeting happened or not.

The general expectation was that capital market intermediaries (including newcomers like us) would cut through a very noisy market and distil the key points into a short email, an analyst note or, as in this case, a 30-second phone call.

But perhaps, in the near future, an AI-powered assistant will do this better than any intermediary.

***

Earlier this summer, I attended a conference where one investor showed how they use AI to scan around 1,000 stocks and identify which ones might be worth considering.

The idea was the following: if an AI-powered assistant knows what you are looking for in a company, including your mandate, valuation range, risk appetite, and more broadly, your definition of a “good investment opportunity”, and if it has access to reliable market and company information, it could produce a useful daily recommendation newsletter. There were, however, a few glaring glitches. Many companies were excluded (!) because the model could not pull the latest financials for a number of foreign companies (something that probably deserves a blog post of its own!). Even so, the general thesis was plausible: much of the initial screening, comparison and analysis that might otherwise occupy several analysts could be done in a few moments.

The traditional risk of weak investor relations was that the market might misunderstand and misprice the company. The new risk is that the company will become altogether invisible.

***

This brings us to where the role of investor relations may be beginning to change, and to the risks of remaining static.

And the natural follow-up question is where and how to show up in this reality. I am not going to pretend that I have all the answers, but perhaps I can share a few high-level pointers or ideas I have heard from my friends working in the market, many of whom have thought about this topic for longer and in greater depth.

1/ Own the investor list and distribution channels. As discussed earlier, the company can no longer rely completely on someone else to carry its story. This means owning your own investor list rather than renting access to one. It also means creating the opportunities to engage (for example by developing ‘your own curriculum’), and owning the content itself, with an emphasis on educating rather than selling, so that the website, presentations, and filings all tell one consistent story.

2/ Be the single source of truth. It also means making that information easy to find, retrieve and interpret. The next generation of investors may begin their research by asking an AI system to identify companies that meet a particular set of criteria. If a company’s results, transcripts, filings, presentations and website are inconsistent, poorly structured or difficult to retrieve, it may simply fail to appear in the answer. What companies publish themselves will remain an important input into these answers.

3/ Provide value to investors that AI cannot. A fund manager once told an audience at a conference about visiting a company in person in Mexico and how special that experience was. He was introduced to different members of the team, sat in the garden, played ping pong, and came away with a memorable sense of the business that no call could capture. Experiences like this are what investors value and why they will continue to turn to management and IR rather than Claude. Another idea is to tailor the material to the individual investor: a dividend-focused global fund wants a different conversation from a local country-specific fund.

4/ Be genuine and candid. As AI-generated content and generic pitches become the default noise, genuine and candid communication from the management team can become a useful differentiator. A CEO's own words, whether in a blog post, an interview, or a candid answer to a hard question carry weight. This is why I think corporate access, ironically, becomes more valuable in an AI world.

So perhaps this is the opportunity we are all nodding at when someone on stage declares that our profession is becoming more strategic. The macro backdrop is that traditional intermediaries are less prominent, the global investor pool is expanding and AI is changing how research is conducted. The opportunity is that the IR team stops being an administrative function or an investor helpdesk and takes greater ownership of the company’s position in the capital market. It does so by focusing squarely on what cannot be replaced by AI: trust, access, context and ability to build strong relationships. Done well and consistently over time, this will allow the company’s story to stand out and provide a clearer answer to the question an investor asked me ten years ago: “What is special about this company?”

1. On my Revolut app, for example, I can easily invest in companies across the world, including in Japan, Poland and Mexico, with just a couple of clicks.