Sell-Side Technology Awards 2020: Best Artificial Intelligence Technology—AlphaSense

As a result of the Covid-19 outbreak, firms need to better understand how various scenarios in seemingly divergent sectors come together to affect a firm’s investment strategy. AlphaSense’s artificial intelligence (AI) tools—which include a combination of machine learning and natural language processing (NLP)—enable financial analysts to navigate the complexity of very technical searches and identify meaningful results.

Throughout the pandemic, information in a volatile market was key, but the challenge was the information available—found in speeches, filings, and research reports—was in an unstructured format and therefore hard to distill. The AlphaSense platform scrapes regulatory filings, company presentations, earnings call transcripts, and news, directing analysts to pertinent information and resulting in time saved.

At the beginning of June, AlphaSense launched a new feature called “theme extraction,” which combines AI and NLP to extract key themes from unstructured documents, like earnings call transcripts.

“By combining theme extraction with our sentiment recognition technology, AlphaSense users can quickly understand which themes are being discussed in a transcript, as well as how positively or negatively. This allows users to rapidly identify changes in sentiment and discussion topics over time, which can indicate a change in a company’s strategy or outlook,” according to the company.

Additionally, the tech company has enhanced its mobile app and some of its workflow features to allow for more collaboration and to generate efficiencies as many workforces work remotely around the globe. Instead of copying and pasting relevant information into emails or documents to share with colleagues, users can annotate and share research across their team within the AlphaSense platform. They can also save searches and alerts to share with colleagues interested in similar topics.

Digital Reasoning won the previous three instances of this award.