Why Your Large-Cap IR Team Needs 24/7 Digital Assistance

We surveyed more than 3000 Investor Relations (IR) websites and what we found kind of surprised us. We wanted to know where public companies are on the AI adoption curve, and - specifically - how many of the companies have a customized, investor-facing, AI-powered chat agent on their company website or mobile app. 

The answer? 

Less than 1%. We won’t speculate on why. But a recent and widely-cited MIT report says that 95% of generative AI pilot programs are falling short of expectations or failing to launch altogether. 

So we can’t rule out the possibility that many of those surveyed are attempting or have attempted without success to implement their own AI-powered investor support tools. This includes the significant number of large-cap businesses we looked at.

But it’s not because generative AI tools don’t work. And it’s not because they don’t have value. It’s because we’ve entered a new phase in the generative AI life cycle. 

Moving From Experimentation To Infrastructure Building

In-house AI experimentation is risky, costly, and time-consuming. But worst of all, the results are often disappointing. That’s why businesses in so many other spaces have simply come to accept the things that generative AI can do well and the things that it can’t. Online retailers are mastering the art of the AI-powered customer service chatbot – a responsive, dynamic onsite AI agent with more comprehensive knowledge of its own product line than any human being could ever retain. 

These businesses succeed by taking generative AI at face value, and by resisting the urge to push it beyond its limits. That’s not to say we don’t believe in the value of imagination and innovation. In the broader AI space, the limits are still unrealized and unknown to us. Only experimentation will take us to these frontiers. 

But in the generative AI space, let’s acknowledge that we know what we’re dealing with. There are things it can do well and things that it can’t. If you’re a tech company, you can spend all day long playing with that line.  

However, in most customer-centric spaces, leveraging AI is not about exploring the unknown. Who has the time or money for that? It’s really just about improving infrastructure with proven AI capabilities. 

Failure to Communicate

In the IR space, the foundation of your infrastructure is effective communication. And respectfully, the IR space isn’t known for embracing the bleeding edge. Consider just how much of the heavy lifting we still leave to paper mailers. 

So before you pull the plug on the concept of AI-powered IR altogether, consider how long we’ve been printing, stamping and sending those one-directional and oft-ignored mailers without an entirely compelling ROI. 

Also consider that AI used correctly can offer some pretty clear ROI by solving one of the biggest IR challenges large-cap companies face. If you work the IR beat for a large-cap company, your biggest stumbling block to effective communication is volume. 

Pump Up the Volume

Your IR team is fielding a constant flood of questions about earnings, and capital allocation. You’re dealing with inquiries about your company’s progress on KPIs and your ESG action items. And not only are these questions constant, but they’re repetitive and they’re coming at you from countless different channels and time zones. 

Naturally, all of that interest is a good thing. It’s why you’re one of the big dogs. But it also presents an enormous communication task, especially as it concerns first-contact and retail investors. 

How much time is spent fielding the same questions, asked 100 different ways? And how effective is your IR team at handling these retail investor inquiries immediately, accurately, and consistently? That question isn’t a knock on your IR game. But let’s be blunt – your team has a lot more time to spend answering questions from institutional investors and analysts.

Prioritizing Retail Investors…With a Little Help

Your retail investors are important, but there are so many of them, and each represents a tiny slice of your business. Not only that, but you probably don’t even have direct access to these investors. After all, most of your retail investors only know how to access your stock through a massive intermediary broker. 

All of this is to say that whatever fraction of time your IR team does spend addressing retail investor inquiries is probably not getting the results you really want. Those results should include clarity, accuracy, consistency, immediacy – generally all the qualities that create deeper engagement and build lasting loyalty with retail investors. 

This is where a 24/7 digital assistant can make a huge difference in the retail investor experience. That’s because, among the things that generative AI is actually good at, using clearly defined data sets to deliver current, accurate, and immediate answers is high on the list. Also high on the list is its ability to recognize patterns and identify signals. 

That means your 24/7 digital assistant is pulling all of that repetition and fragmentation into a single, conversational stream where your retail investors get fast answers and on-demand engagement. Meanwhile, your IR team can focus on follow-up. Think of a digital IR assistant as the top of the funnel for onboarding new investors and a front-line customer service desk for current investors. 

Your chatbot is also top of the funnel for a precious amount of data that you may otherwise be missing. Your digital assistant is capturing all of the client interaction information generated within the chatbot.  Every interaction generates a detailed record so that you can see where your queries are coming from (web chat, SMS, email, etc).  Your chatbot should also help you understand the nature of each interaction, allow you to capture positive and negative feedback, and even let you view the details of each exchange.

That type of feedback and insight can be incredibly valuable as you attempt to understand how your messaging is being received, or even if it’s being received at all. When you track the nature and success of your interactions, you gain the power to tweak your content – to turn misses into hits and turn hits into dingers.

Optimizing The Human Part of Your IR Operation

Meanwhile, your IR team enjoys the benefit of focusing on high-value conversations with institutional investors, regulators, analysts, media outlets, and more, all without neglecting the never-ending flood (if you’re lucky) of retailer inquiries. 

There’s a good chance that you don’t need much convincing. Large-cap companies typically manage a kind of volume (and honestly, repetitive tedium) that obviates the value of digital efficiency. But the risk of in-house implementation is also pretty obvious. 

In our surveys, we’ve learned that a lot of large-cap companies are working behind the scenes to meet top-down AI mandates. There’s a decent chance your organizational leadership has expectations that you are working to use these advanced AI-powered tools to do your job with greater effectiveness and efficiency. But that kind of pressure breeds implementation for implementation's sake – a risky proposition indeed. 

What Retail Investors Care About

To reiterate a point, your investors don’t care about your AI implementation mandates, they don’t care whether you're innovating these things in-house, and they don’t really want to hear about the technology. They just want it to work – to answer questions quickly, accurately, and consistently. 

There’s something very liberating about this fact. It should give you the freedom to outsource your digital assistance, to identify third-party IR tools that simply blend into your tech stack without the in-house experimentation, implementation, and risk. 

For risk-free, 24/7 retail investor engagement, schedule your free AskUrvin demo today!