2023 was the year of generative AI (genAI), and it was no different here at AlphaSense. We’ve been leading the way in unlocking the unprecedented potential for genAI to completely transform market intelligence.
Our mission is to improve the business world’s strategic decision-making by fueling it with better information at every step. And over the course of 2023, enabled by expansion of our premium content collection and advancements in our proprietary AI technology, we have taken giant leaps in furthering this commitment by integrating the latest iterations of AI and LLM (large language model) technologies.
Here are the nine best releases we launched at AlphaSense this past year:
1. Developing our Own Large Language Model
At the core of our genAI technology is AlphaSense LLM (ASLLM), a proprietary model that is purpose-built for market intelligence professionals and their most common use cases. There are four reasons why ASLLM is uniquely beneficial for our clients:
- A Task-Based Approach: Rather than setting out to solve every research obstacle our customer faces on day one—and run the risk of developing a genAI tool falling short of user expectations—we chose to begin developing ASLLM by addressing a single task and learning from that experience. Through testing and training, we used our learnings to step up to the level of functionality within AlphaSense.
- Fine-tuning with Specific Data: We fine tuned ASLLM on business-specific datasets to optimize its performance in the context of desired tasks and workflows. Further, ASLLM has been trained on the world’s leading library of business and financial content aggregated over a decade.
- Understanding the Nuance: For more than a decade, we have been training our AI search engine to understand the unique conceptual and linguistic nuances of market intelligence. For example, in earnings, how long past the publication are earnings documents relevant? Another example could be the distinction between business lines and aggregated financials. Which sections of a document are always, sometimes, or never relevant? These are questions that ASLLM can answer efficiently and thoroughly.
- Leveraging RAG: When making crucial business decisions, there is rarely room for incorrect intelligence, which is why we developed retrieval augmented generation (RAG). RAG grounds ASLLM in authoritative content by asking it to only reason over information retrieved from a specified set of data rather than reproduce knowledge from its training dataset.
2. Summarization During Earnings Season
In June, we launched Smart Summaries, a game-changer for consuming earnings calls. Over the summer, we extended this feature’s functionality for additional use cases including company SWOT analysis and competitive landscaping, and applied it to content sets like Expert Interviews. In the coming months, we plan to extend Smart Summaries across industries and peer groups.
Powered by ASLLM, Smart Summaries delivers greater than 99.9% accuracy, with instant auditability contextualized to the most miniscule level—even an individual sentence found within a source document. This pattern of “trust but verify and contextualize” has driven adoption and led to our surveyed Smart Summaries users reporting more than 5 hours per month saved in their research process. A few of the workflows our users say are improved by Smart Summaries include competitive research, portfolio monitoring, earnings prep, market landscaping, and client/supplier negotiations.
Summarizing the trends and events impacting companies and markets is one of the most important problems the AlphaSense team has solved, and the response from our users has been overwhelming. But they’ve shared that they want to engage with these summaries by asking follow up questions: why, what, who, how will this impact my business? And so we’ve taken it up ourselves to answer these questions, too.
3. Uncovering Insights Locked Away in Tables and Charts
Underpinned by our genAI enhancements, we also launched Image Search—a powerful new way to discover insights hidden within charts and tables. They often represent the most important information in a document because the author has taken the time to quantify and package their findings.
However, those important insights are often hidden from traditional text search engines. Image Search, powered by optical character recognition (OCR), allows us to surface charts and tables natively in search results without having to scour through documents. Surveyed Image Search users report up to 7 hours per month of time savings, with some even living in the view by default—a testament to its value and ease of use.
4. Expanded Insights from the Trenches
AlphaSense’s Expert Transcript Library provides users instant access to tens of thousands of transcripts,covering a diverse range of topics and perspectives from highly-vetted experts— from former executives to customers, competitors, and channel partners.
In 2023, we grew our transcript library by 35% to include over 35,000 transcripts, adding, on average, more than 300 new transcripts each week. AlphaSense’s Expert Insights is now among the fastest-growing transcript libraries on the market. Our focus this year has been on expanding coverage of private companies, with the result being that more than 10% of our transcript catalog focused on private companies as well as global coverage, with roughly one-third of our new transcripts covering entities domiciled outside of the United States.
Secondly, AlphaSense has significantly enhanced its discovery and compliance workflows, improving the efficiency of both user insights and compliance team operations. Key developments include the introduction of popular transcripts and expert transcript ratings to provide users with highly relevant content. Additionally, AlphaSense has introduced features like analyst perspective and transcript focus tags to aid users in quickly identifying the nature of the content.
For compliance, particularly in regulated industries, new capabilities like private company compliance pre-approval, granular compliance locks, employment threshold filters, and expanded expert background information have been deployed to manage compliance risks effectively.
5. Extended Value from Broker Research
Access to premium broker research is essential to all market intelligence professions—providing rich insights from the world’s top analysts across companies, industries, and macro topics. Since 2020, we’ve developed Wall Street Insights® into a best-in-class research offering—providing exclusive access to Goldman Sachs, Citi, and Bank of America research, in addition to top brokers like Barclays, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, and thousands of others. In 2023, we added Wolfe Research,Truist, Maxim Group, Singer Capital Markets, and most notably, Wells Fargo along with their coverage of 1,000-plus companies and key sectors.
As part of the expansion of coverage, we increased the content around small and micro cap companies in the US and UK. And for users in the APAC and EMEA regions, they can now bring their own entitlements for Mizuho, Nomura, and UniCredit research into AlphaSense.
6. Enhanced Ability to Model and Extract Key Data
One of the key benefits of AlphaSense is the ability to easily locate and extract quantitative or structured information from unstructured content (i.e., major company filing documents). In 2023, we delivered a major upgrade to our Table Explorer toolset in order to better enhance workflows around these key data sets.
Now, users can automatically stitch similar tables together to create a single historical table of any numeric chart in major SEC filings (10Q, 10K, 8K, 20F, 40F, etc) without ever having to leave the AlphaSense platform. Furthermore, users now have the capability to customize data within tables, as well as export the final table for greater modeling and analysis work.
7. Improved Monitoring Experience
We’ve relaunched our dashboard experience, giving users an increased ability to customize their dashboards like never before. Now, it’s easier than ever to track key events and dive into their underlying document or trend.
As we have rolled out AlphaSense’s new dashboard experience in phases, our users are excited to tailor their dashboard views so as to increase their efficiency and confidence in monitoring the companies and industries they care about from a single platform.
8. Ability to Create Powerful Deliverables
Once they’ve assembled their intelligence, our customers want to document and organize findings in a format that can easily be shared with stakeholders. In September, we released an advanced Notebook capability that helps users create and manage intelligence deliverables, and share those outputs with stakeholders, all within one platform.
This Notebook update includes the addition of a superior text editing experience, giving users an enormous range of options to structure and lay out t insights, add charts and tables identified through Image Search directly into a note, and easily find notes through our Smart Synonym search technology.
In our blog, 5 Competitive Intelligence Templates to Use in AlphaSense’s Notebook, we put together five templates you can use in Notebook to streamline the process of creating your competitive intelligence deliverables.
9. Helping Enterprises Solve their Intelligence Challenge
With the rise of genAI in 2023, we saw a new market challenge arise for many of our customers: how do we unlock our team’s knowledge that is buried in traditional knowledge management tools to increase productivity? According to assessments by Panopto and YOU.gov, major U.S. corporations suffer annual losses exceeding $40 million as a result of everyday operational inefficiencies directly linked to inadequate knowledge sharing. This is certainly not a new problem, but genAI is now sparking newfound enthusiasm for solving it.
In October 2023, we announced AlphaSense Enterprise Intelligence—our secure, end-to-end platform powered by genAI that allows you to centralize your market intelligence by integrating proprietary internal content alongside our premium external content. With the ability to search, discover, and interrogate any content source in one place, AlphaSense Enterprise Intelligence provides a scalable way to get all the key perspectives on any market in one place.
A Sneak Peak into 2024
As we begin 2024, the year ahead promises to be equally exciting. Keep an eye out for the release of Assistant, with the first version giving users the ability to ask follow-up questions to a search in natural language, and generative AI-powered Industry Summaries on dashboard, giving users a summary of all the key topics across an entire industry.
As we progress through the year, we will also continue to expand the content sets that our genAI toolset leverages, launch new voice of customer (giving insights into the product and service buying process) within our expert insight offering, as well as expand the application of the generative AI tools themselves, including the abilities of Assistant.
Don’t miss our State of Generative AI & Market Intelligence Report 2023.
And for those looking to get started right away, start your free trial of AlphaSense today.
Tom is a product marketing director who works with the search, summarization, and monitoring product teams at AlphaSense. Tom has spent 10 years in B2B marketing, in all company sizes from global to early-stage startups.
Read all posts written by Tom Gardiner
