Drawing on his own early career experience in investment banking, AlphaSense Founder and CEO Jack Kokko created the blueprint for a business intelligence platform that would solve common research workflow challenges across industries and roles. The result, AlphaSense, was purpose-built by a former analyst, with analysts in mind.
Recently, Jack sat down with Ted Seides, the founder and host of the Capital Allocators podcast, to discuss the evolution of AlphaSense as the “Google for Finance” to the industry’s most trusted AI platform for business and finance, serving more than 90% of top asset managers, leading investment banks, and over half of the Fortune 500.
In this podcast, Jack shares his perspective on the AI innovation race, unveiling new cutting-edge products, how AlphaSense provides value across a business’s entire ecosystem, and what remains on the horizon in AlphaSense’s journey.
Note: The below is an excerpt from the full interview and has been edited for clarity. Catch Jack and Ted’s full conversation on the podcast to learn how AlphaSense is scaling an “always-on” business intelligence machine.
Pivoting to Stay on the Cutting Edge
From ideation to launch, staying on the cutting edge of AI developments requires a nimble, iterative approach to overcome the peaks and valleys. Pairing human evaluation with model evaluation and knowing what each model is capable of in practice “keeps you on your toes,” and is one “you can’t claim to master at any time.”
Ted Seides: “What's been most surprising to you in this process of testing the LLMs?”
Jack Kokko: “What's been hard to do is to stay on really knowing where the cutting edge is, knowing what each model is capable of in practice, even the system, you can't really build it, design it, build it, it's ready, no. It's a very iterative process. You have to go and keep evolving it and seeing how much human evaluation you could do, how much LLMs can actually effectively evaluate each other, and that changes as their capabilities evolve.…We have to be very much ready to pivot when something changes. That readiness to pivot and the flexibility is perhaps one of the bigger learnings from this that you have to be on top of this all the time and invest the time and even including myself, the CEO, I feel like I got to understand what's going on. These are critical choices for our product. Product is what adds value to users.”
Evolution of LLM Growth to Fuel the AI Race
The recent launch of the AlphaSense AI Interviewer unified legacy sentiment modeling with an evolved, sophisticated LLM that defied what was once thought to be possible. The result was the automation of the highly laborious, time-consuming task of expert calls — a “game changer” in the evolution of AI.
Ted Seides: “In the last couple years, starting with ChatGPT, these consumer-facing LLMs have popped onto the scene. I'm curious how that has changed — positively, negatively, or both — the trajectory of what you've done for a long time before they were around?”
Jack Kokko: “Mostly, LLMs now can just raise the game on everything, every part of what we're doing and generating and opening up new opportunities. One thing that we built and released just weeks ago was a new AI interviewer. …Private equity firms have to get on a phone and talk to an expert for half an hour, 45 minutes, and there's a lot of friction in that process. But what we now have is an AI interviewer that does a good job of that. We're now able to point this new system in any direction and the AI interviewer will hop on the phone anytime the expert is available, whether it's this time zone or something on the other side of the world.”
Beyond automation, the AI interviewer also creates value in cyclical and repetitive practices that improve workflows and gain the same insights, with less friction:
Jack Kokko: “It's also able to help us generate new content sets where maybe buy-side analysts wouldn't be available to do this repeated work where, for example, we're doing Channel Checks, covering dozens of industries and talking to the same expert every month to understand what is going on with pricing and demand supply dynamics, market share shifts and so forth in a granular industry and getting a pulse on that industry every single month from the same person and doing that across dozens of industries, getting a pulse on the whole economy that way. It'd be hard to get buy-side analysts to commit to doing that every single month as a repeated process, but AI will do it, whatever we ask it to do.”
In addition, a shift toward agentic, automated workflows is resulting in productivity gains, freeing up resources for higher-value analysis and accelerating decision-making:
Jack Kokko: “You don't have to draw those connections yourself. You can question what the machine is giving you and ask different questions from different angles, but at least you get a narrative answer that is very intelligent through chain-of-thought reasoning that the machine has already done so much work, that probably is a lot more than you would've been able to do as an analyst. Very few of us have time to spend weeks researching a project and often hear from clients that a single deep research report that our AI produces now gives them the same 10 pages that they spent three weeks producing with a team of people.”
Optimizing the Entire Business & Finance Ecosystem
With early widespread adoption by hedge funds, AlphaSense quickly evolved to gain users in the corporate world that were entering new markets, launching new products, buying companies, and looking for competitive intelligence. The common denominator among these knowledge workers was a pressing need for business intelligence.
Ted Seides: “So the business started, as you mentioned, mostly with hedge funds. You did mention there's a little different use case for corporations. How has it evolved from that initial user base to who your customer base is today?”
Jack Kokko: “Everybody's doing the same kind of work. Take an M&A deal as an example. When that deal breaks, there's probably even usage in all of these areas — from analyzing it from private equity bidders to corporate bidders to hedge funds, maybe trading on rumors to the investment bankers that worked on the deal to consultants, worked on the deal and so forth. So dozens or hundreds of people have been using AlphaSense from all the different angles around that same deal because it impacts all of them. It's become kind of an ecosystem that uses information about industries, markets, companies that we’re able to serve from all these directions.”
Redefining Table Stakes
AlphaSense is trailblazing the path for the industry’s most sophisticated AI workflows. Purpose-built to think and act like an analyst, we power the most important decisions across the world’s leading investing and corporate firms with speed and confidence.
Listen here to Jack and Ted’s podcast, and find links to the episode on iTunes, Spotify, and YouTube.
Try AlphaSense today, and redefine your edge.
