Artificial Intelligence and Investor Relations
Investor relations (“IR“) demands a rigorous approach to financial analysis, data management, regulatory compliance, and communication technologies. But IR is as much art as it is science. Successful IR requires a deep understanding of human relationships and storytelling. In particular, IR experts have the ability to sense which aspects of your company’s investment thesis are relevant to which investors, and highlighting the most relevant aspects to their audience.
I was speaking with a colleague this week about the evolution of the investor relations function in the context of the art and science of IR. With artificial intelligence (“AI”) capable of handling much of the heavy lifting in tasks such as data analysis and basic content development, IR teams are (or should be) becoming leaner. We are now at a point where companies should be able to get more horsepower out of their investor relations with fewer people. But what skills and capabilities should leaders be retaining in the IR function going forward?
The Exponential Maturation of AI
Remember Ferris Bueller’s famous line?
“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it”
The rapid maturation of artificial intelligence means that life, and the velocity of business execution, has accelerated even faster. Most management teams are “missing it” and have been incredibly slow to adopt a strategic approach to AI implementation in the areas of finance, communications, and investor relations.
But who can blame them? Only a year ago, most AI platforms were unable to reliably compose a simple news release. Now, AI’s performance in many areas is comparable to that of a master’s‑degree graduate with a few years of experience. AI can no longer be treated as a peripheral experiment. It will reshape how companies and their sell side partners engage with investors. The longer companies wait to retool these functions and incorporate AI strategically, the further behind the competition they will fall. Unfortunately, most companies have left it to employees to experiment with AI which is a risky business. See our article on Artificial Intelligence and Selective Disclosure for more information.
Playing to AI’s Strengths
Artificial Intelligence shows great promise in the areas of pattern‑recognition, automating well‑defined tasks, and has shown high reliability as long as it is operating within narrow domains over a short period of time.
Under these conditions, generative AI can support IR teams by providing initial data analysis, content summaries, and basic content generation. Agentic AI can handle more goal‑oriented tasks, including preliminary management of inbound and outbound voice calls.
Avoiding the Pitfalls of AI
In June 2025, researchers at Apple published “The Illusion of Thinking: Understanding the Strengths and Limitations of Reasoning Models via the Lens of Problem Complexity”. Apple’s paper shows that as problem complexity grows, accuracy declines and thinking effort collapses – even when models are allowed more computational budget. Lund University’s Peter Gärdenfors likewise explains that AI lacks “incentives, opinions, or empathy,” and that even very young children can understand cause‑and‑effect reasoning in ways AI currently cannot.
The take home point is to keep AI tasks narrowly defined and short in duration if you want success.
Leave the Art of IR to the Experts
Investor relations is two‑way communication: investors continually articulate their priorities, their opinions about a company’s strategy, and the quality of its capital allocation. This is done both explicitly and implicitly.
One of the most nuanced aspects of investor relations is the ability to identify unexpressed investor needs. The company’s positioning and messaging can then be adjusted appropriately to address those needs. This involves crafting top-level messaging that aligns the company’s narrative with underlying investor priorities. Creative ideation is required to frame your company’s strengths in ways that resonate both emotionally and logically with investors. While investors may not always voice their deeper concerns or aspirations, a skilled IR professional learns to extract these elements, often reading between the lines.
Once an investor’s priorities and criteria are understood, the art of IR is connecting them to the appropriate attributes of the company’s investment thesis.
The complex problem solving and empathy required for these functions are traits that AI does not possess.
AI’s Role in Execution
AI can play a significant role in execution once top level messaging is articulated in a structured manner. Specifically, IR Teams should look to AI to:
- Analyze and summarize key messaging from competitor webcasts, conference calls, investor days, news releases, management’s discussion and analysis, etc.
- Analyze industry data sources and summarize emerging trends
- Evaluate the deployment of your messaging framework across all mediums for consistency
- Evaluate the accuracy of your relationship management system and flag contacts that require further vetting
- Low level derivative content development within the framework of a defined messaging matrix and the oversight of an IR expert.
- Chatbots directing investor website visitors to public disclosures relevant to their inquiry
- Agentic inbound call management when the IR contact person is unavailable to book a follow-up call in an open time slot of IR’s calendar
- Agentic outbound outreach to identify and book introductory calls with target investors
These are just a few good places to start when looking at AI implementations right now.
Conclusion
The strategic implementation of generative and agentic AI should empower finance, investor relations, and communication teams to scale activities and accelerate execution. This scale and speed would otherwise be prohibitively expensive from a man power perspective. Properly implemented, AI will allow these teams to do much more with less people.
Retaining the right people is key. Most teams should reduce to two individuals, either full‑time or fractional:
- An IR Expert with extensive experience in top-level messaging ideation and relationship management
- A digital and AI technologies analyst
If you’re struggling with the implementation of digital strategies and artificial intelligence please consider MCI’s Digital and AI Technology Services.