Asset managers conducting market research frequently face a critical challenge: the information they need is fragmented across data feeds, model providers, and point solutions that weren't built to work together. By the time research is synthesized, opportunities have shifted and decisions are harder to defend. Decision-grade AI is changing that by helping teams move from research to a defensible decision faster, without sacrificing the rigor a high-stakes call demands.
According to broker research in the AlphaSense platform, AI is fundamentally reshaping market research in asset management by shifting from simple information retrieval to "agentic" systems that autonomously synthesize data and execute complex analytical workflows. The integration of generative AI is estimated to save approximately 40% of an analyst's weekly hours, reducing typical workloads from 60 to 36 hours. This efficiency gain is being used to expand research into historically neglected areas.
Below, we outline best practices for performing market research in asset management, the various types of research workflows, and the benefits of leveraging decision-grade AI for optimized performance, less risk, and better investment outcomes.
Leverage In-Depth Financial Analysis
With AlphaSense's Financial Data suite, investment teams can move from raw numbers to actionable understanding in minutes:
- Build a Complete Company Picture – Pull clean, standardized financial statements, historical vs. forward consensus estimates, valuation multiples, and customizable peer comps across 18,000+ public companies — all in one company profile, without leaving the platform.
- Work from Ready-Built Financial Models – Skip the model-building step with a library of 4,500+ ready-to-use, auditable Canalyst models, complete with granular KPIs and segment-level detail. Models update instantly on earnings day, with every number traceable back to its source.
- Go Beyond GAAP with Industry-Specific KPIs – Benchmark performance using sector-specific operating metrics across 115+ industries, and export clean comp tables straight into a valuation model or strategy deck.
- Track M&A Activity Across Your Coverage Universe – Use the M&A Screener's 400+ filters across financials, growth, valuation, sector, and geography to flag consolidation trends, takeover risk, and comparable transactions affecting the names you cover — with one-click AI summaries that surface the strategic rationale behind a deal.
- Update Models Without Leaving Excel – The native Excel add-in pulls statements, ratios, and KPIs directly into your workbook, refreshes with one click before a meeting or earnings call, and keeps every figure audit-linked back to its source.
Uncover Instant Insights with Summarization and Deep Research
The ability to surface insights instantly saves investment teams the considerable time it would take to review lengthy documents such as earning reports, broker research, and expert call transcripts to extract valuable information.
Smart Summaries draws from AlphaSense's premium content universe and provides an analysis of the positives, negatives, outlook, and Q&A from earnings transcripts — each one linked back to the source text. Beyond just a company's self-reported results and outlook, you also get summaries of analyst reactions post-earnings call, so you capture the full picture of bullish or bearish reactions and can position your portfolio accordingly.
For deeper, multi-step questions, Deep Research runs as an autonomous agent — running dozens of searches, reasoning across thousands of results, and returning a comprehensive, cited analysis in a fraction of the time manual synthesis would take.
And when a workflow needs the same set of prompts applied across many documents at once — think building a comp table across a coverage universe — Generative Grid returns organized, structured answers built for exactly that kind of repeatable analysis.
Identify Emerging Trends and Pinpoint Disruptors
To stay ahead of trends actively shaping the industry, analysts have traditionally aggregated intelligence from multiple sources and have run the risk of missing critical insights elsewhere — until now.
AlphaSense's Generative Search turns that process into a natural-language conversation with your entire content library: ask a question about a theme, sector, or company, and get an answer sourced from premium content, cross-referenced and cited down to the exact source snippet. Beyond structured data, Generative Search surfaces unstructured sources — news articles, company documents, presentations, and other qualitative material that's ordinarily time-consuming to scour — and image search extracts data from charts, tables, and images that a regular keyword search would miss.
Deep Research mode takes this a step further and automates the creation of in-depth analysis about companies, trends, or industry topics. The model conducts dozens of searches, parses through thousands of potentially relevant results, and reasons over all of it to produce comprehensive, detailed analysis about any topic. All of this happens in a fraction of the time it would take a human.
The AlphaSense platform centralizes all the information you need to execute top-down and bottom-up searches with ease, enabling you to map the market, identify segment-specific drivers, and discover new companies not on your radar.With AlphaSense’s exclusive and premium content library spanning 500M+ documents, with new documents added daily across filings, earnings transcripts, press releases, premium news, and regulatory documents — you can ensure no stone goes unturned.
Discover 360 Degree Expert Perspectives
AlphaSense has evolved the way researchers access expert perspectives with an extensive expert transcript library and Expert Call Services, now enhanced by AI-led expert calls. Our AI interviewer pairs client-selected experts with an AI Interview Agent trained on AlphaSense's entire premium content library, conducting compliance-first calls on your behalf and delivering compliance-approved transcripts in hours rather than weeks.
Our personalized expert calls — human-led or AI-led — can complete your investment research process and maximize your return on investment (ROI) by streamlining your connection to experts and quality insights.
Leveraging Expert Insights allows you to fast-track your understanding of an industry or market and gain a competitive edge with informed decision-making. Additionally, granular insights from custom expert calls — including Channel Checks for real-time perspectives on demand, pricing, sentiment, and competitive shifts — allow you to extract the exact information needed to validate your investment process from firsthand industry perspectives that are closest to the “source of truth.”
Unlock the Value of Your Firm’s Own Research
Your firm's own research, models, and institutional knowledge are just as valuable as external market intelligence — if you can get to them. AlphaSense's Enterprise Intelligence solution unifies your proprietary internal content — PDFs, SharePoint documents, internal research notes, Excel sheets, and more — alongside the external content library, using Connectors to sync 20+ everyday systems including file storage, communications, and productivity tools. Permission mirroring keeps your existing role-based access controls intact, so nothing gets exposed that shouldn't be.
You can interrogate long documents with natural-language chat that goes straight to the source to surface the most relevant insights, instantly surfacing proprietary market knowledge alongside external content while removing unknowns, potential blind spots, and reputational risk.
Move From Research to Finished Deliverable
Research does not stop at synthesis — the next stage is turning key insights into a memo, model, or deck. AlphaSense’s suite of workflow tools automates this step end-to-end, from source documents to a finished deliverable.
In Generative Search, users can ask a natural-language question and the model will create a deliverable — including decks of any size, from a single-slide company profile to a 40-slide investment thesis deck. Our slide agent supports template uploads, so the outputs are on-brand from the very first draft, no reformatting required. Users can leverage custom agents to automate the generation of recurring deliverables, from earnings summaries to sector updates, and have them land as polished drafts.
With our Workspaces, you can bring filings, models, transcripts, and prior research together in one place so your team can move from source documents to a defensible view without stitching together separate tools - whether you're refreshing a thesis, prepping for an earnings call, or revisiting a name ahead of a portfolio review.
For turning research into finished outputs, AlphaSense for PowerPoint lets you query the content library and place cited insights directly into a slide, automating formatting and chart updates and reviewing decks for stale or incomplete data before they go out. AlphaSense for Excel brings financials, filings, transcripts, and comps into a workbook with full source traceability and cross-references model assumptions against research in real time.
For more information, watch our webinar: The Last Mile: Connecting Your Workflow Across Research, PowerPoint, and Excel
Keep A Pulse on Market Movement with Sentiment Analysis
Sentiment analysis plays a critical role in structuring the investment recommendations that are passed on to portfolio managers as part of the research process. Analysts rely on a plethora of buy-side and sell-side research, company documents, expert perspectives, regulatory filings, and more to craft their findings and share vetted reports with the broader investment team.
As a machine learning and NLP-based feature, sentiment analysis sifts through many of the documents analysts rely on, extrapolating tone and language nuance to provide the subtext within seconds. This feature is built into the AlphaSense platform, enabling you to quickly recognize the positive, negative, or neutral sentiment in the source you are analyzing.
AlphaSense Sentiment Indices take this further, aggregating individual company sentiment scores into structured, sector-level benchmarks — currently spanning 15 sectors including Financials, Energy, Semiconductors, Enterprise Software & Cloud.
Because tone in earnings calls often shifts before formal guidance or fundamentals catch up, tracking an index's movement quarter over quarter can surface a change in corporate conviction before it becomes consensus. For asset managers, that means comparing management tone across a coverage universe, benchmarking a company's conviction against sector peers, and spotting where the narrative and the numbers start to diverge.
Decision-Grade AI for Asset Management Market Research
By facilitating the insights and knowledge that are essential for decision-making, market research undoubtedly serves a critical role in investment recommendations and positioning. It can ultimately affect the outcome of an investment decision, influence portfolio performance as a result of rebalancing and/or re-positioning, and help you identify lucrative opportunities.
Leveraging decision-grade AI throughout the discovery process ensures best practices for conducting research, streamlining the intelligence and insights investment teams need to act with confidence and with the speed of the market — and, just as importantly, to defend that call when it's challenged.
Beyond creating efficiencies and accelerating the speed of insights, AI-driven market research also minimizes manual tasks that may have yielded insights with limited or inaccurate visibility, potentially resulting in inferior investment guidance or reputational risk. Source-level citation and auditability on every AI output help teams walk into an IC meeting, board discussion, or stakeholder review with a position they can defend without having to reconstruct the research behind it.
For firms weighing where their research and data actually live, AlphaSense is SOC 2 Type II and ISO/IEC 27001 certified, encrypts data at rest and in transit, and never trains its AI on customer data — with deployment options including Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) and Bring Your Own Bucket (BYOB) for firms that need documents to remain entirely within their own environment.
Having the ability to proactively monitor macroeconomic conditions, get end-to-end research coverage, instantly analyze expert perspectives, and track early signals for market-moving trends is a hallmark of AI's vast capabilities in this space, and one that ultimately fosters alpha generation.
Get Ahead with AlphaSense
A successful investment strategy starts with swift, accurate insights you can defend. AlphaSense’s decision-grade AI eliminates the unknowns of locating crucial market intelligence by quickly parsing through 500M+ premium documents — expert transcripts, broker research, financial filings, and more — to pinpoint quality insights and metrics in seconds.
Learn how AlphaSense helps the top 90% of asset management firms sift through noise, accelerate research, and move from first signal to decision with confidence.
Let our decision-grade AI do the heavy lifting so you can competitively position your team — start your free trial of AlphaSense today.
