Panelists discuss keeping your story consistent under market scrutiny as they look ahead to the 2026 earnings season
‘Investors, analysts – everyone in financial markets – is consulting a vast amount of increasing data sources to inform their investment decisions,’ said Laurie Havelock, IR Impact editor, kicking off the recent briefing that brought together Jesse Rose, head of IR at Reddit, Dave Bezanson, vice president of IR and pensions at EMERA and Christopher Napolitano, account executive at AlphaSense, the event partner.
While data opens up a world of insights, Havelock pointed to the added pressure it brings when IROs must distil everything that is out there into something they can deliver to the board. This, said Napolitano, is what folks at AlphaSense term ‘boiling the ocean’.
So how are IROs doing this? What tools are they using and what tips are they looking to employ for the 2026 earnings season?
Anyone wanting to access the full recording of the IR Impact briefing, Earnings in 2026: Keeping your story consistent in 2026, can do so online.
Get philosophical
Early in the conversation, Napolitano summed up comments from both Bezanson and Rose – putting them into the broader context. ‘Something Dave touched on right away is capital allocation transparency: what’s the rationale behind your buybacks? What’s the rationale behind dividends, debt, pay downs, M&A transactions? The market expects more of a philosophy around these things today and less of just a number.’
Another theme, covered from the Reddit perspective by Rose, was an organization’s responsiveness to the current macro environment. Building on this, Napolitano said ‘it’s no hidden thing that we’re living through some crazy change times and that there’s some a lot of uncertainty in the market today. How does your organization demonstrate how adaptive you might be to changing inflation, interest rate changes, currency exchanges, regulatory shifts?’
Investors want to understand your strategy for resilience and how you can be ahead of your competitors in those areas, he added. They want to ‘know your plan to support sustainable margins going forward. I think a lot of folks in IR are feeling the pressure to communicate that, especially going into next year.’
Don’t consume data for the sake of it
Given the deluge of data out there and the fast pace of change on the macro front, Bezanson stressed the need to be discerning. His team does try to ‘lean in on the sell side, getting a lot of information about the sector through that [channel], but even that is a waterfall of information,’ he said. ‘Having tools that can help us distill all of the information that’s coming at us, in a way that can be easily turned into something that’s digestible by the senior leadership team or ultimately, the board, for decision making is important.’
He also highlighted the need for a strategic approach to data. In the case of EMERA, this might be taking ‘a strategic lens to the sector’ that is ultimately presented to the board. It is a case of ‘this is what we’re seeing. It’s a competitive market for capital. We need to be thoughtful about how we are positioning the company. This is what it means for a company like ours and here’s what we might want to do in response to that’.
In other words, it is not just about consuming information for the sake it, continued Bezanson. Instead, it is about ‘consuming information to inform ourselves on key strategic decisions. I think that’s an important use [especially since] there is so much information out there right now that you could just get buried in it.’
Go beyond the macro noise
Linked to Bezanson’s points on boiling down the ocean were comments from Rose in response to a question about keeping on top of macro events.
‘It’s an important part of the job, but it’s not the whole picture,’ said Rose. ‘You want to get investors to think long term and understand what the longer-term vision and strategy is – and executing against that. With that said, you certainly cannot ignore things that are in front of you in the near term, and certainly how your peers are talking about these different themes and factors that are impacting the broader industry, [or] how they’re talking about their performance and their roadmaps.’
Napolitano shared that, at AlphaSense, he’s increasingly seeing clients look to ways – in particular AI-powered tools – that can speed up the time spent on the near term, to free up time for the longer term or the more strategic aspects of the role.
Consume information like the Street
Sticking with Napolitano, he later explained to listeners how clients – IROs and CFOs – are increasingly looking to see what the Street sees: ‘I’m hearing Hey, can you set up a screen for me that looks like a sell-side analyst screen and how they would research our company or our industry?’ By seeing what analysts are seeing in real time, he said users ‘can be better prepared for changes, better prepared for questions – and less likely to be caught off guard’.
These comments came out of a segment of discussion around the ways in which the buy and sell side have been using big data and AI long before the corporate world caught on. The IROs on the panel agreed that this increasingly feeds into the way they craft their output.
Use AI – even if it isn’t yet a game changer
Of course, no IR conversation – in particular around earnings – would be complete without at least a mention of AI tools.
Rose and Bezanson each talked about the ways in which they’re already using AI – getting a script started or running the Q&A through a large language model, for example. But they also shared some AI aspirations as well.
‘I’d love to see a platform that can really help distill and aggregate all of the this content and this data – the sell side, research reports, the macro trends – into a digestible format for the likes of me and my team, and in a way that I can package that up to my management team, my board, [while also being able to] trust the accuracy of it,’ commented Rose, adding that, at Reddit, ‘we’re leaning into AI in any way that we can.
‘IR teams are generally lean, so any source of technological improvements – especially to become more productive – is going to be a win for us.’Click here to access the full IR Impact briefing, Earnings in 2026: Keeping your story consistent in 2026.
