Recent IR Impact briefing examined how an AI assistant could help you find better investor targets
Where can AI help IROs make better targeting decisions? It may be best served by adding an additional helping hand to your IR team.
This was the focus of an IR Impact briefing, held this week in partnership with Q4, that examined the impact of agentic AI on investor targeting strategies.
While the technology is still emerging, it was clear from our discussion with IR experts that it could fill a very significant niche in the targeting process. Here are four things we learned from the briefing – and four things you might consider for your own targeting efforts.
Decision-making power
Agentic AI is a new term for many, while others may have images of customer service chat bots in mind. But as Christopher Allen, vice president, product marketing at Q4 explained, the technology is more about providing the user with a virtual, personal assistant.
‘It can compare data and provide you outcomes, but it’s not actually making a decision and performing an action on your behalf,’ he explained. ‘It’s not just performing logic that you’ve provided it.’
While that may manifest in a company’s customer service arm in the first place – where the AI might respond and take rudimentary actions on behalf of an organization – agentic AI can be armed with your policies, protocols or targeting priorities to provide you with potential actions to take, depending on your preferences.
Beyond automation
That extends the scope of AI beyond automation – running certain routine tasks automatically without the need for human intervention – to helping IROs carry out tasks, said Gregg Lampf, vice president of IR at Ciena and a long-time user of AI in his IR program. Using agentics requires a similar amount of mindfulness over the same concerns around the technology, he added.
‘We’re going to use a competitive intelligence tool that is agentic to monitor our peers – what has been said in conference calls, press releases, you name it – and come back to us on a determined timeframe, or maybe gives it to us to prioritize,’ he explained. AI agents can then arm an IRO with relevant information when a particular investor makes an inbound inquiry. Lampf said he was excited about it: ‘It’s going to be a very powerful platform.’
Reflecting the buy side
Another important part of the puzzle is understanding how the buy side is currently using AI in their investment process, the panellists agreed. For Lampf, using these tools to understand how your company’s disclosures and announcements have been interpreted is the key to refining your future messaging.
‘When you can get that nuanced information – as you’re trying to talk to a growth investor versus a value investor, a semiconductor investor versus a common equipment investor, a bull versus a bear – these tools can be very powerful in helping elevate those things as you’re considering various activities,’ he added.
For Glen Hayashi, partner and head of US investor relations at Softbank, it all serves to better understand your investors. ‘Our clients are our customers as well, and we have to know where they stand, and so we have to meet them where they’re at,’ he explained. ‘It doesn’t matter what they say, it only matters what they hear.’
Turning intelligence into action
All the speakers agreed that agentic AI would best serve when augmenting IROs’ efforts once they have a meeting with an investor booked. Allen explained that Q4’s own AI agent – fittingly called Q – was all about equipping users with a wide universe of information to make sure that meetings were as effective as possible. ‘Targeting is an art and a science.’ He added. ‘I think the AI takes care of the science of it, but the art still lives with professionals like yourselves.’
‘Once you get the meeting, that’s where we have to stand out as IROs and really personalize that story,’ said Hayashi. ‘If you know that this analyst, this portfolio manager is talking about a certain thing, and you find that out, and you know that you’re hitting that right now, that’s a layup.
To watch a full replay of this IR Impact briefing on demand, follow this link to Brighttalk.
